PerDiS: Design, Implementation, and Use of a PERsistent DIstributed Store

Projet SORThe PerDiS (Persistent Distributed Store) project addresses the issue of providing support for distributed collaborative engineering applications. We describe the design and implementation of the PerDiS platform, and its support for such applications. Collaborative engineering raises systems issues related to the sharing of large volumes of fine-grain, complex objects across wide-area networks and administrative boundaries. PerDiS automatically manages all these aspects in a well defined, integrated, and automatic way. Distributed application programming is simplified because it uses the same memory abstraction as in the centralized case. Porting an existing centralized program is usually a matter of a few, well-isolated changes. We present some performance results from a proof-of-concept platform that runs a number of small, but real, distributed applications on Unix and Windows NT. These confirm that the PerDiS abstraction is well adapted to the targeted application area and that the overall performance is promising compared to alternative approaches