Linearisability is a really rather strong property on a distributed system. There is a good discussion in [1] with some much more precise definitions on which I'm going to base this article.
The setup is a distributed system with some client processes which can perform operations (think: RPCs) on some remote data objects (think: a single-value register). The operations, being remote, take some nonzero amount of time between the client invoking the operation and being notified of its