On the Interconnection of Causal Memory Systems
Antonio Fernandez Ernesto Jimenez Vicente Cholvi
To appear at Nineteenth Annual
ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS Symposium on PRINCIPLES OF DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING (PODC
2000), Portland, Oregon, 16-19 July 2000
Abstract
A large amount of work has been invested in devising algorithms to implement
distributed shared memory (DSM) systems under different consistency models.
However, to our knowledge, the possibility of interconnecting DSM systems
with simple protocols and the consistency of the resulting system has never
been studied. With this paper, we start a series of works on the properties
of the interconnection of DSM systems, which tries to fill this void. In
this paper, we look at the interconnection of propagation-based causal
DSM systems. We present extremely simple algorithms to interconnect two
such systems (possibly implemented with different algorithms), that only
require the existence of a bidirectional reliable FIFO channel connecting
one process from each system. We show that the resulting DSM system is
also causal. This result can be generalized to interconnect any number
of DSM propagation-based causal systems.