Design Framework for a Distributed Single-Address-Space System

In a distributed, single-address-space system, all important requirement is the independence of the operations possible on a given page from the present location of this page in the physical memory. The network traffic generated by execution of every page operation should be independent of the network size. Furthermore, the number of messages required to determine the position of the page in memory should be low and independent of the page operations performed in the past. Finally, when normal working condition is restored after a node or network failure, the system should be able to determine the position of each page in the distributed memory. We present a design framework for a memory management system complying with these requirements. The state of the system is defined in terms of both the location of the virtual pages in memory and the page contents. The definition of state consistency is used as a foundation for the notion of mapping of page names into node names.