On Inhibition and Atomicity in Asynchronous Consistent-cut Protocols

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the existence of non-inhibitory consistent-cut protocols: protocols which create without interfering with the actions of the system in which they are running. Specifically, we consider systems in which processors have only three kinds of events: sends, receives, and internal events (which do not involve communication with another processor). We show that there is no non-inhibitory consistent-cut protocol for such systems.