REPLICATED RESOURCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR MANAGING RESOURCES IN A DISTRIBUTED APPLICATION AND MAINTAINING A RELATIVISTIC VIEW OF STATE

A method and apparatus for accessing resource objects contained in a distributed memory space in a communications network, including dividing the distributed memory space into a plurality of memory pools, each pool containing a collection of resource objects, providing a plurality of resource manager objects, each resource manager object having an associated set of memory pools and a registry of network unique identifiers for the resource objects in those pools, and accessing a given resource object via its network identifier. Another aspect of the invention is to provide a relativistic view of state of a plurality of objects, each object generating a state vector representing that object's view of its own state and the state of all other objects, each object sending its state vector to other objects, and each object maintaining a state matrix of the state vectors.