Our work combines Java compilation to native code with a run-time library that executes Java threads in a distributed-memory environment with true parallelism. This approach is implemented within the Hyperion system for the distributed execution of compiled Java programs on clusters of PCs. To provide the illusion of a shared memory to Java threads, Hyperion has been built on top of DSM-PM2, a portable implementation platform for multithreaded distributed-shared-memory protocols. We have designed, implemented and experimented with two alternative consistency protocols compliant with the Java Memory Model. The protocols have different mechanisms for access detection: the first one uses explicit locality checks, whereas the second one is based on page faults. We illustrate the effects of the two access-detection techniques with five applications run on two clusters with different interconnection networks: BIP/Myrinet and SISCI/SCI.