A Methodological Construction of an Efficient Sequentially Consistent Distributed Shared Memory

A concurrent object is an object that can be concurrently accessed by several processes. Sequential consistency is a consistency criterion for such objects. Informally, it states that a multiprocess program executes correctly if its results could have been produced by executing that program on a single processor system. (Sequential consistency is weaker than atomic consistency - the usual consistency criterion - as it does not refer to real-time.) The paper proposes a simple protocol that ensures sequential consistency when the shared memory abstraction is supported by the local memories of nodes that can communicate only by exchanging messages through reliable channels.