Architectural issues in adopting distributed shared memory for distributed object management systems

Distributed shared memory (DSM) provides transparent network interface based on the memory abstraction. Furthermore, DSM gives us the ease of programming and portability. Also the advantages offered by DSM include low network overhead, with no explicit operating system intervention to move data over network. With the advent of high-bandwidth networks and wide addressing, adopting DSM for distributed systems seems to be attractive. In this paper, we propose two alternative distributed system architectures which are attempts at adopting DSM for distributed object management systems. The two proposed architectures are distributed shared cache (DSC) architecture and distributed shared recoverable virtual memory (DSRVM) architecture. We address several major issues in the proposed architectures.