PerDiS: Design, implementation, and use of a PERsistent DIstributed store

The PerDiS (Persistent Distributed Store) project addresses the issue of pr oviding support for distributed collaborative engineering applications. We describe the design and implementation of the PerDiS platform, and its supp ort for such applications. Collaborative engineering raises system issues related to the sharing of la rge volumes of fine-grain, complex objects across wide-area networks and ad ministrative boundaries. PerDiS manages all these aspects in a well defined , integrated, and automatic way. Distributed application programming is sim plified because it uses the same memory abstraction as in the centralized c ase. Porting an existing centralized program written in C or C++ is usually a matter of a few, well-isolated changes. We present some performance results from a proof-of-concept platform that r uns a number of small, but real, distributed applications on Unix and Windo ws NT. These confirm that the PerDiS abstraction is well adapted to the tar geted application area and that the overall performance is promising compar ed to alternative approaches.