In this paper, we describe an e cient software-only Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) consistency protocol for an unconventional but important application domain - object transactional processing. Designers of transactional applications, while sensitive to performance issues, already accept signi cant overhead for the added functionality provided by transactions and, we speculate, would be willing to accept some small additional overhead for the bene t of \easy" distributed parallel execution. This is in contrast to the performance critical needs of the high-end scienti c applications typically targetted by DSM system designers. While, after 10 years of performance enhancement, software DSMs are still considered inadequate by a large part of the parallel computing community, we believe they are now more than su ciently mature to support distributed transactional environments. The key to making DSM attractive to the developers of transactional applications is ease of use. The much t...
Peter C. J. Graham, Yahong Sui