Fundamentals for Consistent Event Ordering In Distributed Shared Memory Systems

Abstract

A large number of tasks in distributed systems can be traced down to the fundamental problem of attaining a consistent global view on a distributed computation. This problem has been addressed by a number of studies which focus on systems with message passing as their only means of interprocess communication. In the paper at hand we extend this restricted system model by additionally accounting for an abstract memory to be shared by the processes. We specify necessary and sufficient conditions for constructing a consistent global view on such systems and present helpful definitions, which are meant to be a solid formal base for further studies