The Atomic Manifesto: a Story in Four Quarks

Abstract

This report summarizes the viewpoints and insights gathered in the Dagstuhl Seminar on Atomicity in System Design and Execution, which was attended by 32 people from four different scientific communities: database and transaction processing systems, fault tolerance and dependable systems, formal methods for system design and correctness reasoning, and hardware architecture and programming languages. Each community presents its position in interpreting the notion of atomicity and the existing state of the art, and each community identifies scientific challenges that should be addressed in future work. In addition, the report discusses common themes across communities and strategic research problems that require multiple communities to team up for a viable solution. The general theme of how to specify, implement, compose, and reason about extended and relaxed notions of atomicity is viewed as a key piece in coping with the pressing issue of building and maintaining highly dependable systems that comprise many components with complex interaction patterns