Event ordering in a shared memory distributed system

Abstract

Past research has concentrated on ordering events in a system where processes communicate through messages. The authors look at issues in ordering events in a distributed system based on shared objects that interact via remote procedure calls (RPCs). They derive clock conditions for ordering operations on an object and provide clock maintenance schemes for time-stamping execution events. An object clock is associated with every shared object for clock exchange among processes. A clock maintenance algorithm is incrementally presented for objects where operations are atomic and an algorithm is described for large-grained objects where operations are nested and non-atomic.<>