A sequentially consistent distributed shared memory

Recently, distributed shared memory (DSM) systems have received much attention because such an abstraction simplifies programming. An important class of DSM implementations is one which uses cache memories to improve efficiency. In this paper, we present a cache-consistency protocol for DSM which requires significantly less communication than previously proposed protocols. This is achieved by maintaining one bit of state information for each cache object in the system. We prove that the protocol satisfies a formulation of sequential consistency