Operating Systems: Concurrent and Distributed Software Design

Part III: Transactions

The issues addressed in Part II are associated with the correct execution of a single abstract operation by a sequential process which executes as part of a concurrent system of processes. We now assume this problem solved by means of the techniques described in Part II and move on to compose higher-level abstract operations. The notion of a 'high-level' operation is, again, an informal one and can be thought of as an abstract operation consisting of a number of lower-level abstract operations.

An operation hierarchy may be located entirely within the main memory of a single computer; it may span the main memories of computers in a distributed system; it may span main memory and persistent memory of a single computer; ...