Coarse and fine grain objects in a distributed persistent store

This paper describes our experiences with the development of a Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) based on a single, very large, paged virtual memory space distributed across an arbitrary number of discrete nodes connected to a network of homogeneous computers. The DSM supports two object granularities: coarse-grain objects called modules and fine-grain objects called segments. We show that support for both modules and segments has advantages in the areas of naming and location, protection, data consistency, transaction management and garbage collection.