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), (pdf) .
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).
Luís Rodrigues