How to Approach the Virtual Shared Memory Paradigm

This special issue aims to direct attention to the great potential offered by virtual shared memory (VSM) on distributed hardware architectures. Industry has not yet exploited the advantages offered by VSM-based tools. This is particularly surprising for two reasons: firstly, much research in this area has been published ([2] is a comprehensive collection of references on VSM). Secondly, existing client/server-based technologies obviously do not fully satisfy all needs of robust distributed applications. Asymmetric application architectures predominate the market. They do not exhibit the advantages offered by distribution: better performance..