A Dynamic Light Weight Group Service
Luís Rodrigues, Katherine Guo, António Sargento, Robbert
van Renesse, Brad Glade, Paulo Veríssimo, Kenneth Birman
Selected sections of this report were published in "A Transparent
Light-Weight Group Service", proceedings of the 15th IEEE Symposium on
Reliable Distributed Systems, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Canada, October,
1996.
Abstract
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.
Also available
extended report (gzip postscript).
Additional work
The previous report gives emphasis on the support mechanisms of the
architecture and presents performance results for static assignments.
We have done additional work on the dynamic aspects of this
architecture. You can also check the following paper:
- Dynamic Light-Weight Groups.
- Katherine Guo and Luís Rodrigues.
- Proceedings of the 17th
IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems
-
Baltimore, Maryland, USA, May, 1997
- Available abstract (html) and
extended report (gzip postscript).