Generic support for synchronization and consistency in Arias

In the context of Arias, a distributed shared memory service with a persistent global address space, we have designed a general framework for consistency protocols. We motivate the general design of Arias and the specific approach to consistency, which is to allow applications to choose the consistency protocol adapted to their data synchronization model. A simple entity, the zone, is introduced, whose management functions constitute the base of a generic support for consistency protocols. This generic support layer is described, and particularly its interface with the specialized consistency protocol modules. We also illustrate the use of this generic support by describing implementation examples of the entry consistency model.