Abstract

So much has already been written about everything that you can't nd out anything about it. | James Thurber, Lanterns and Lances (1961) Loosely-coupled distributed systems haveevolved using message passing as the main paradigm for sharing information. Other paradigms used in loosely-coupled distributed systems, such as rpc, are usually implemented on top of an underlying message-passing system. On the other hand, in tightly-coupled architectures, such asmulti-processor machines, the paradigm is usually based on shared memory with its attractively simple programming model. The shared-memory paradigm has recently been extended for use in more loosely-coupled architectures and is known as distributed shared memory (dsm [153, 178,58]) in this context. This chapter discusses some of the issues involved in the design and implementation of such adsm in loosely-coupled distributed systems and brie y discusses related work in other elds. In dsm systems, processes share data transparently across node boundaries � data faulting, location, and movement are handled by thedsm system. Among other things, this allows parallel programs designed to use the shared-memory abstraction to execute without modi cation on a

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