aleta@cs.cornell.edu (Aleta Ricciardi) (02/09/91)
Using Process Groups to Implement Failure Detection in Asynchronous Environments Aleta Ricciardi Ken Birman Cornell University Department of Computer Science Ithaca, NY 14853 USA TR 91-1188 Research supported in part by DARPA/NASA Ames Grant NAG 2-593, and in part by grants from IBM and Siemens Corp. ABSTRACT: Agreement on the membership of a group of processes in a distributed system is a basic problem that arises in a wide range of applications. Such groups occur when a set of processes co-operate to perform some task, share memory, monitor one another, subdivide a computation, and so forth. In this paper we discuss the Group Membership Problem as it relates to failure detection in asynchronous, distributed systems. We present a rigorous, formal specification for group membership under this interpretation. We then present a solution for this problem that improves upon previous work. Keywords : Asynchronous computation; Fault detection; Fault tolerance; Distributed Consensus; Membership list management. =========== The tech report is available by anonymous ftp from cu-arpa.cs.cornell.edu