The Delta-4 Approach to Dependability in Open Distributed Computing Systems

As part of the European Strategic Programme for Research in Information Technology (ESPRIT), the Delta-4 project is seeking to define an open, faulttolerant, distributed computing architecture. This paper presents the overall Delta-4 framework for open, fault-tolerant, distributed computing systems and sketches the current implementation which is based on a local area network with specific atomic multicasting and error-processing protocols for communicating between replicated software components.