Integrated Bounds for Disintegrated Storage
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We point out a somewhat surprising similarity between non-authenticated Byzantine storage, non-systematic coded storage, and emulations of shared registers from smaller ones. A common characteristic in all of these is the inability of reads to safely return a value obtained in a single atomic access to shared storage. We collectively refer to such systems as disintegrated storage, and show integrated space lower bounds for asynchronous regular wait-free emulations in all of them. In a nutshell, if readers are invisible, then the storage cost of such systems is inherently exponential in the size of written values; otherwise, it is at least linear in the number of readers. Our bounds are asymptotically tight to known algorithms, and thus justify their high costs.
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