Type specific fault tolerating protocols for a distributed object memory

Distributed shared memory (DSM) is an accepted paradigma for interprocess communication in loosely coupled distributed systems. Distributed object memory (DOM) is an abstraction of DSM which provides sharing of language-level objects. DOM systems which tolerate faults are highly necessary. In this paper, we present different fault-tolerant protocols, each adequately designed for a different class of objects. Fault tolerance is mainly achieved by already-existing object copies that are spread throughout the DOM system, rather than by saving copies to stable storage. We show how DOM systems can easily be extended by type-specific protocols to efficiently guarantee fault tolerance