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Distributed Memory Architectures(DMA)
Scalable memory systems distributed across multiple agents with coordinated access patterns and consistency mechanisms
In 30 seconds
- What
- Splits memory storage across multiple agents with protocols ensuring data consistency and coordinated reads/writes across nodes.
- When to use
- Many agents need shared state at scale, geographic distribution is required, or single memory bottleneck would limit throughput.
- Watch out
- Consistency protocols add latency and complexity; network partitions can cause divergent state or cascading failures across agents.
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Distributed Memory Architectures: Overview
Scalable memory systems distributed across multiple agents with coordinated access patterns and consistency mechanisms
- Distributed storage coordination
- Consistency protocol management
- Load balancing across memory nodes
- Cross-agent synchronization
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References
The papers, specifications, and repositories this pattern is based on.
- Brewer's CAP Theorem: Consistency, Availability, Partition Tolerance (Gilbert & Lynch, 2002)
- Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System (Lamport, 1978)
- The Byzantine Generals Problem (Lamport et al., 1982)
- Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store (DeCandia et al., 2007)
- In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm (Raft, Ongaro & Ousterhout, 2014)
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