The Complexity Of Weak Consistency

Weak consistency is a memory model that is frequently considered for shared memory systems. Its most distinguishable feature lies in a category of operations in two types: data operations and synchronization operations. For highly parallel shared memory systems, this model offers greater performance potential than strong models such as sequential consistency by permitting unconstrained optimization on updates propagation before synchronization is invoked. It captures the intuition that delaying updates produced by data operations before triggering a synchronization operation does not typically affect the program correctness.