Invariant consistency: a mechanism for inter-process ordering in distributed shared memory systems

Abstract

We propose the notion of invariant consistency that allows programmers to specify inter-process ordering requirements. In our approach, we allow a programmer to label a program and provide an ordering specification. In particular, we associate a counter count/sub l/ with each label l that counts the number of times the operation labeled l has been executed. The ordering specification is given by an invariant on these counters.