Protocol enhancements for robustness of the release-consistent memory system in Beehive

Problem
Beehive is a cluster system developed at Georgia Tech. It allows for shared memory style parallel programming on a cluster of Sun Ultras interconnected by a high speed network. The API allows the development of shared memory style parallel applications using one of two different memory consistency models: delta consistency (DC), and release consistency (RC). Beehive also implements a cooperative strategy for failure tolerance at the application level for individual node failures. Currently, however, only the DC memory model has the protocol enhancements to make it robust to failures.

Your work in this project is to think about the protocol enhancements necessary to make the RC memory model implementation robust. You should write a short report describing your design to accomplish this goal.

If you are more adventurous you can actually look at the implementation to see how you will implement your design (not required for the course though).

Background:
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/computing/Architecture/Beehive/
(for a description of Beehive)
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/computing/Architecture/papers/temporal.ps.gz

Deliverables
Desgin document for RC robustness.

Evaluation
Based on the completeness of the design document.