A transparent light-weight group service

The virtual synchrony model for group communication has proven to be a powerful paradigm for building distributed applications. Implementations of virtual synchrony usually require the use of failure detectors and failure recovery protocols. In applications that require the use of a large number of groups, significant performance gains can be attained if these groups share the resources required to provide virtual synchrony. A service that maps user groups onto instances of a virtually synchronous implementation is called a light-weight group service. This paper proposes a new design for the light-weight group protocols that enables the usage of this service in a transparent manner as a test case, the new design was implemented in the Horus system, although the underlying principles can be applied to other architectures as well. The paper also presents performance results from this implementation.

[1]  Robbert van Renesse,et al.  Horus: a flexible group communication system , 1996, CACM.

[2]  David R. Cheriton,et al.  Leases: an efficient fault-tolerant mechanism for distributed file cache consistency , 1989, SOSP '89.

[3]  Robbert van Renesse,et al.  Reliable Multicast between Micro-Kernels , 1992, USENIX Workshop on Microkernels and Other Kernel Architectures.

[4]  Roy Friedman,et al.  Strong and weak virtual synchrony in Horus , 1996, Proceedings 15th Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems.

[5]  Katherine Guo,et al.  Structured virtual synchrony: exploring the bounds of virtual synchronous group communication , 1996, EW 7.

[6]  André Schiper,et al.  Virtually-synchronous communication based on a weak failure suspector , 1993, FTCS-23 The Twenty-Third International Symposium on Fault-Tolerant Computing.

[7]  Louise E. Moser,et al.  Extended virtual synchrony , 1994, 14th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems.

[8]  Robbert van Renesse,et al.  Light-weight process groups in the Isis system , 1993, Distributed Syst. Eng..

[9]  I. Bey,et al.  Delta-4: A Generic Architecture for Dependable Distributed Computing , 1991, Research Reports ESPRIT.

[10]  Robbert van Renesse,et al.  Reliable Distributed Computing with the Isis Toolkit , 1994 .

[11]  Kenneth P. Birman,et al.  Exploiting replication in distributed systems , 1990 .

[12]  Kenneth P. Birman,et al.  Object-oriented reliable distributed programming , 1992, [1992] Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Object Orientation in Operating Systems.