Integrating coherency and recoverability in distributed systems

  • Authors:
  • Michael J. Feeley;Jeffrey S. Chase;Vivek R. Narasayya;Henry M. Levy

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA

  • Venue:
  • OSDI '94 Proceedings of the 1st USENIX conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation
  • Year:
  • 1994

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

We propose a technique for maintaining coherency of a transactional distributed shared memory, used by applications accessing a shared persistent store. Our goal is to improve support for fine-grained distributed data sharing in collaborative design applications, such as CAD systems and software development environments. In contrast, traditional research in distributed shared memory has focused on supporting parallel programs; in this paper, we show how distributed programs can benefit from this shared-memory abstraction as well. Our approach, called log-based coherency, integrates coherency support with a standard mechanism for ensuring recoverability of persistent data. In our system, transaction logs are the basis of both recoverability and coherency. We have prototyped log-based coherency as a set of extensions to RVM [Satyanarayanan et al. 94], a runtime package supporting recoverable virtual memory. Our prototype adds coherency support to RVM in a simple way that does not require changes to existing RVM applications. We report on our prototype and its performance, and discuss its relationship to other DSM systems.