Treffer: The GARF Library of DSM Consistency Models

Rachid Guerraoui, Benoit Garbinato, Karim R. Mazouni D'epartement d'Informatique Ecole Polytechnique F'ed'erale de Lausanne CH-1015, Suisse e-mail: guerraoui@di.epfl.ch GARF is an object-oriented system intended to support high level and modular programming of reliable distributed applications. GARF provides a distributed shared memory abstraction, but does not enforce any particular consistency criterion. GARF rather offers an extensible library of consistency criteria. The programmer can bind a specific criterion to each object, according to its use and semantics. This flexible approach enables to increase availability of objects of which behaviors do not require strong consistency guarantees. 1 Introduction Shared memory is an attractive programming paradigm to represent communication among distributed computing entities. It has been widely used for many years, and is at a higher abstraction level than the message passing paradigm. Providing the shared memory abstraction on top of.