Preliminary thoughts on problem-oriented shared memory: a decentralized approach to distributed systems

ABSTRACT

Much of the work to date on distributed systems has focused on the correct choice of communication paradigm, stressing (for example) message primitives, remote procedure call, problem- oriented protocols and so on. A distributed system service is then implemented as a module executing on particular server machine that is accessed using these communication facilities. In contrast, the shared memory paradigm has been used on multiprocessor and uniprocessor systems. In the shared memory paradigm, the state of a service is stored in shared memory and implemented in a decentralization fashion across multiple processors using this shared memory.This paper describes some preliminary thoughts on applying the shared memory paradigm to distributed systems. For efficiency reasons, shared memory is not provided in its full generality, but only with the semantics required for the applications of interest. This type of application-specific memory is called a problem-oriented shared memory. The use of problem- oriented shared memory is illustrated by describing several applications we are exploring in the V distributed system. We also discuss basic requirements on a communication system to support this approach.

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