ken@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (Ken Birman) (02/22/91)
This is to announce the availability of a substantially revised version of a paper we previously released under the title "Fast Causal Multicast". The revision is different enough so that we decided to change the title and release it under a new TR number. The paper has been conditionally accepted for publication in ACM Transactions on Computer Systems. The main changes are a better organization for the paper, new results that permit a substantial reduction in the overhead on must multicasts, and a substantially extended performance section. Lightweight Causal and Atomic Group Multicast Kenneth Birman, Andre Schiper, Pat Stephenson The Isis toolkit is a distributed programming environment based on support for virtually synchronous process groups and group communication. We present a new suite of protocols in support of this model. Our 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. We conclude that process groups and group communication can achieve performance and scaling comparable to that of a raw message transport layer - a finding contradicting the widespread concern that this style of distributed computing may be unacceptably costly. Machine: cu-arpa.cs.cornell.edu Login: anonymous Passwd: your email address File: pub/TR91-1192.ps.Z (copy in binary mode) (or, email for a copy to isis@cs.cornell.edu)