Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) is a term from computer science applying to wide class of software and hardware implementations, in which a set of nodes in addition to limited non-shared private memory has access to large shared memory.

Nodes may be processors (multiprocessor) or separate computers. DSM nay be hardware or software.

Shared memory may be separated into shared parts distributed amongst nodes and main memory, or all memory may be distributed between nodes. The memory coherence is maintained via one of coherence protocols in accordance to choosen consistency model.

Examples of such system are TreadMarks, Delphi etc.