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The Computer Journal Advance Access published online on November 3, 2009
The Computer Journal, doi:10.1093/comjnl/bxp090
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Computer Society. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

A Methodological Construction of an Efficient Sequentially Consistent Distributed Shared Memory1

Vicent Cholvi1,*, Antonio Fernández2, Ernesto Jiménez3, Pilar Manzano3 and Michel Raynal4

1 Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, Spain
2 LADyR, GSyC, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, 28933 Móstoles, Spain
3 Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28031 Madrid, Spain
4 IRISA, Université de Rennes, Campus de Beaulieu, 35 042 Rennes, France

* Corresponding author: vcholvi{at}uji.es

Received 10 September 2008; revised 25 September 2009

The paper proposes a simple protocol that ensures sequential consistency. The protocol assumes that the shared memory abstraction is supported by the local memories of nodes that can communicate only by exchanging messages through reliable channels. Unlike other sequential consistency protocols, the one proposed here does not rely on a strong synchronization mechanism, such as an atomic broadcast primitive or a central node managing a copy of every shared object. From a methodological point of view, the protocol is built incrementally starting from the very definition of sequential consistency. It has the noteworthy property that a process that issues a write operation never has to wait for other processes. Depending on the current local state, most read operations issued also have the same property.

Key Words: distributed systems • distributed shared memory • sequential consistency

Handling editor: Peter Harrison

1 A preliminary version of this paper was published in [1].


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