Patent ID: 8010832

Claim:
A method comprising, storing, in a central hub that is coupled to a plurality of computational devices, a data structure that grants locks for accessing common data stored at the central hub, wherein the common data is shared by the plurality of computational devices, and wherein the plurality of computational devices are numbered sequentially with ordinal numbers at initialization time; maintaining locally for each computational device, those locks that are held by the computational device in the data structure stored at the central hub; and in response to a failure of the data structure stored at the central hub, performing: (i) determining a selected computational device of the plurality of computational devices to be a manager system, wherein determining the manager system further comprises, determining which operational computational device of the plurality of computational devices has been numbered with a least ordinal number, and selecting the manager system to be the determined operational computational device that has been numbered with the least ordinal number; (ii) communicating to the manager system, by other computational devices besides the manager system, all locks held by the other computational devices in the data structure stored at the central hub; (iii) generating and storing the data structure and the common data at the manager system; and (iv) performing transactions with respect to the data structure stored at the manager system, until the data structure stored at the central hub is operational.