Communications of the ACM
Implementing Distributed Shared Memory For Dynamic Networks
Credit: Ignotus the Mage
Reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic, the three Rs underlying much of human intellectual activity, not surprisingly, also stand as a venerable foundation of modern computing technology. Indeed, both the Turing machine and von Neumann machine models operate by reading, writing, and computing, and all practical uniprocessor implementations are based on performing activities structured in terms of the three Rs. With the advance of networking technology, communication became an additional major systemic activity. However, at a high level of abstraction, it is apparently still more natural to think in terms of reading, writing, and computing.
Key Insights
While it is difficult to imagine distributed systems—such as those implementing the World Wide Web—without communication, we often imagine browser-based applications that operate by retrieving (that is, reading) data, performing computation, and storing (that is, writing) the results. In this article, we deal with the storage of shared readable and writable data in distributed systems with the focus on implementations that provide resiliency and consistency in dynamic settings, namely, in systems that are subject to perturbations in the underlying distributed platforms composed of computers and networks that interconnect them. The perturbations include failures of individual computers, dynamically changing collections of computers participating in the system, and failures and delays in the communication medium.
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