Application-Aware Consistency: An Application to Social Network

This work weakens well-known consistency models using graphs that capture applications’ characteristics. The weakened models not only respect application semantic, but also yield a performance benefit. We introduce a notion of dependency graphs, which specify relations between events that are important with respect to application semantic, and then weaken traditional consistency models (e.g., causal consistency) using these graphs. Particularly, we consider two types of graphs: intra-process and inter-process dependency graphs, where intra-process dependency graphs specify how events in a single process are related, and inter-process dependency graphs specify how events across multiple processes are related. Then, based on these two types of graphs, we define new consistency model, namely application-aware consistency. We also discuss why such application-aware consistency can be useful in social network applications. This is a work in progress, and we present early ideas regarding application-aware consistency here. ∗This research is supported in part by National Science Foundation awards 1409416. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agencies or the U.S. government.