developed at the IBM Almaden Research Center, which uses atomic tran.sactions as a unified failure recovery mechanism for a client-server structured distributed system. Transactions allow failure atomicity for related activities at a single server or at a number of independent servers. Rather than bundling transaction management into a dedicated language or recoverable object manager, Quicksilver exposes the basic commit protocol and log recovery primi-tives, allowing clients and servers to tailor their recovery techniques to their specific needs. Servers can implement their own log recovery protocols rather than being required to use a system-defined protocol. These decisions allow servers to make their own choices to balance simplicity, efficiency, and recoverability. Categories and Subject Descriptors: D.4.3 [Operating Systems]: File System Management-distrib-uted file systems; file organization; maintenance; D.4.5 [Operating Systems]: Reliability-FauZt-tolerance; checkpoint/restart; H.2.4 [Database Management]: Systems--distributed systems; trun.s-action processing