Reducing host load, network load, and latency in a distributed shared memory

Changes made to a distributed shared memory that runs of Sun workstations under SunOS 4.0 operating systems, called Mether, are outlined. Protocols developed to use Mether and that minimize host load, network load, and latency are discussed. The changes to Mether involve exposing an inconsistent store to the applications and making access to the consistent and inconsistent versions very convenient, providing both demand-driven and data-driven semantics for updating pages, and allowing the user to specify that only a small subset of a page needs to be transferred