Transparent fault tolerance for corba

Applications are increasingly being programmed using the CORBA distributed object standard. CORBA's Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP) and its mediating Object Request Broker (ORB) allow CORBA objects to interact, transcending differences in their locations, hardware architectures, operating systems and programming languages. The Eternal system provides the fault tolerance that CORBA lacks. Because typical applications are already quite complex, and because typical application programmers do not have skills in fault tolerance, Eternal provides fault tolerance without requiring the modification of applications, or the modification of complex commercial ORB code. The transparency of Eternal's fault tolerance infrastructure to both the application and the ORB is possible through the use of interception technology. The Eternal Interceptor transparently captures the IIOP messages exchanged between the CORBA objects of the application, and diverts these messages to the Eternal Replication Mechanisms and Logging-Recovery Mechanisms. The Eternal system provides fault tolerance through object replication, with support for active and passive replication, duplicate detection and suppression, state transfer, logging and recovery. The use of the Totem reliable totally-ordered multicast protocol to communicate IIOP messages between replicated objects facilitates replica consistency. Eternal can exploit other multicast group communication protocols, such as the SecureRing secure reliable totally-ordered multicast protocol, to provide support for effective majority voting for CORBA applications. Strong replica consistency is ensured for both passive and active replication, as replicas fail and recover, and as operations are performed that update the states of the replicated objects. Recognizing that most CORBA applications and ORBS employ multithreading, a source of non-determinism, Eternal provides mechanisms to enforce determinism transparently, thereby ensuring replica consistency even for multithreaded applications. Eternal has been deployed on seven different unmodified commercial CORBA ORBS. Unmodified applications triply replicated by Eternal incur a 10% overhead in response time compared to their non-fault-tolerant counterparts. The technology of Eternal forms the basis of the forthcoming standard for Fault-Tolerant CORBA.

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