A global atomicity primitive

This paper describes a novel mechanism that supports a global atomicity primitive. In distributed systems, it is important that concurrent access to shared data items does not violate some pre-defined notion of consistency. A global atomicity primitive is a simple programming paradigm for controlling access to shared data, that guarantees to preserve consistency (provided individual processes do) and suffices for many applications. The mechanism presented also provides other desirable coherency properties, including failure atomicity, liveness and responsiveness. In addition, its concurrency control can be configured variably between optimistic and pessimistic.