pat@cs.cornell.edu (Pat Stephenson) (04/30/90)
A postscript copy of a new paper: "Fast Causal Multicast", by Ken Birman, Andre Schiper and Pat Stephenson can be found for anonymous ftp on cu-arpa.cs.cornell.edu (128.84.254.3) in pub/bypass.ps. Here's the abstract: A new protocol is presented that efficiently implements a reliable, causally ordered multicast primitive and is easily extended into a totally ordered one. Intended for use in the ISIS toolkit, it offers a way to *bypass* the most costly aspects of ISIS while benefiting from *virtual synchrony*. The facility scales with bounded overhead. Measured speedups of more than an order of magnitude were obtained when the protocol was implemented within ISIS. One conclusion is that systems such as ISIS can achieve performance competitive with the best existing multicast facilities - a finding contradicting the widespread concern that fault-tolerance may be unacceptably costly. The paper may be referenced as Cornell Computer Science Technical Report TR-1105, April 1990. If you're not on the internet and would like to get a copy of this, get in touch with me and I'll see what I can do. Pat Stephenson