APPLICATION OF THE CONTRACT NET PROTOCOL TO DISTRIBUTED DATABASES Hector Garcia-nolina and Gio Uiederhold 1 Department of Computer Science Stanford University Stanford, California, 94305

Each computing facility, which we will call a node, includes a process which is in charge of the management of some section of the data base. Each node is connected to the other nodes to allow the sharing of data. We will assume that there is neither shared memory nor global data in the system. Except for this restriction, our model will not specify the interconnection architecture of the network. Au important objective of our studies is in fact the development of measures of computational activities which will lead to evaluation criteria for architectural alternatives [10].