Robust State Sharing for Wide Area Distributed Applications

In this article, we present the Mocha wide area computing infrastructure we are currently developing. Mocha provides support for robust shared objects on heterogeneous platforms, and utilizes advanced distributed shared memory techniques for maintaining consistency of shared objects that are replicated at multiple nodes to improve performance. In addition, our system handles failures that we feel will be common in wide area environments. We have used an approach that makes use of multiple communication protocols to improve the efficiency of shared object state transfers in Mocha. We also provide an empirical evaluation of our prototype implementation for local area, wide area, and home service networks and present a sample home service application that has been programmed with the system.