  Partial orders are used extensively for modeling and analyzing concurrent
computations. In this paper, we define two properties of partially ordered
sets: width-extensibility and interleaving-consistency, and show that a partial
order can be a valid state based model: (1) of some synchronous concurrent
computation iff it is width-extensible, and (2) of some asynchronous concurrent
computation iff it is width-extensible and interleaving-consistent. We also
show a duality between the event based and state based models of concurrent
computations, and give algorithms to convert models between the two domains.
When applied to the problem of checkpointing, our theory leads to a better
understanding of some existing results and algorithms in the field. It also
leads to efficient detection algorithms for predicates whose evaluation
requires knowledge of states from all the processes in the system.
