The complexity of robust atomic storage

Dobre, D. and Guerraoui, R. and Majuntke, M. and Suri, Neeraj and Vukolić, M. (2011) The complexity of robust atomic storage. In: PODC '11 Proceedings of the 30th annual ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS symposium on Principles of distributed computing. ACM, pp. 59-68. ISBN 9781450307192

Abstract

We study the time-complexity of robust atomic read/write storage from fault-prone storage components in asynchronous message-passing systems. Robustness here means wait-free tolerating the largest possible number t of Byzantine storage component failures (optimal resilience) without relying on data authentication. We show that no single-writer multiple-reader (SWMR) robust atomic storage implementation exists if (a) read operations complete in less than four communication round-trips (rounds), and (b) the time complexity of write operations is constant. More precisely, we present two lower bounds. The first is a read lower bound stating that three rounds of communication are necessary to read from a SWMR robust atomic storage. The second is a write lower bound, showing that Ω(log(t)) write rounds are necessary to read in three rounds from such a storage. Applied to known results, our lower bounds close a fundamental gap: we show that time-optimal robust atomic storage can be obtained using well-known transformations from regular to atomic storage and existing time-optimal regular storage implementations. © 2011 ACM.