Year: 1991
Type: article
Abstract: The ISIS toolkit is a distributed programming environment based on support for virtually synchronous process groups and group communication. A suite of protocols is presented to support this model. The approach revolves around a multicast primitive, called CBCAST, which implements a fault-tolerant, causally ordered message delivery. This primitive can be used directly or extended into a totally ordered multicast primitive, called ABCAST. It normally delivers messages immediately upon reception, and imposes a space overhead proportional to the size of the groups to which the sender belongs, usually a small number. It is concluded that process groups and group communication can achieve performance and scaling comparable to that of a raw message transport layer. This finding contradicts the widespread concern that this style of distributed computing may be unacceptably costly.
Authors: Kenneth Birman, André Schiper, Pat Stephenson
Institutions: Cornell University, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Networks and Communications
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1985349143