Implementing a replicated service with group communication

  • Authors:
  • Alberto Bartoli

  • Affiliations:
  • Dipartimento di Elettrotecnica, Elettronica, Informatica, Università di Trieste, Via Valerio 10, 34100 Trieste, Italy

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Systems Architecture: the EUROMICRO Journal
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Distributed computing systems are quickly pervading many aspects of everyday life. The public demand for high reliability of these systems can only grow, together with their penetration in critical application domains. Group communication is a technology that may greatly simplifying the deployment of reliable distributed applications, even in environments composed of off-the-shelf hardware and software components. In this paper we attempt to provide an introductory and unified view to group communication. To make the presentation concrete, we shall analyze in detail how group communication may help in implementing a highly-available service based on replication. We shall consider a service whose interface allows determining the outcome of a non-idempotent operation previously submitted to the service, e.g., an update, that returned prematurely at the client because of a communication error--a key practical problem. We shall also provide a discussion of the performance that can be obtained in practice with group communication platforms.