On Group Communication in Large-Scale Distributed Systems

摘要

An increasing number of applications with reliability requirements are being deployed in distributed systems that span large geographic distances or manage large numbers of objects. We consider the process group mechanism as an appropriate application structuring paradigm in such large-scale distributed systems. We give a formal characterization for the attribute "large scale" as applied to distributed systems and examine the technical problems that need to be solved in making group technology scalable. Our design advocates multiple roles for group membership over a minimal set of abstractions and primitives. The design is currently being implemented on top of "off-the-shelf technologies for both communication and computation.