Beyond Storage: State as a Runtime Control Problem in Parallel and Distributed Systems

Abstract

Shared state increasingly shapes both performance and failure behavior in streaming, serving, retrieval, and continual-learning systems. Existing studies, however, often isolate access control, hardware-aware execution, memory management, and long-horizon updates. The review organizes this literature around three coupled dimensions: state access and scheduling, state-aware execution, and state evolution and reuse. Across these dimensions, the literature is synthesized through a common scaffold: state object, control surface, coupling path, evaluation boundary, and unresolved contract. This comparison identifies recurring anti-patterns and informs a contract-oriented blueprint and disturbance-aware evaluation agenda. Taken together, the evidence characterizes state management as a runtime control problem.