Distributed Shared Memory: Recoverable and Non-recoverable Limited Update Protocols

In the recent years, many protocols for implementing Distributed shared Memory (DSM) have been proposed. The implementations can be broadly divided into two classes: invalidation-based schemes and update-based schemes. Many approaches have also been proposed to make the DSM system recoverable from a failure. However, much of this work is restricted to reliable DSM based on invalidation. In this report, we propose a reliable DSM that uses a limited update protocol and the release consistency model. In this update protocol, multiple copies of each page may be maintained at different nodes. However, it is also possible for a page to exist in only one node, as some copies of the page may be invalidated. We propose an implementation that makes the limited update protocol recoverable from a single node failure, by guaranteeing that at least two copies of each page exist. The proposed recoverable DSM incorporates the release consistency model. The report presents preliminary evaluation of th..