A locking facility for parallel systems

Clustered and parallel architectures provide the ability to construct systems of high capacity, scalable features, and high availability. In order to provide high throughput in a shared-disk architecture, fundamental advances in multisystem locking technologies are required. This paper describes a locking architecture and operating system support provided for the locking services in a clustered environment. Although initially targeted toward database systems, the functions are general enough for use in many other environments. The paper also describes the products that have deployed this technology.