rcbc@cs.cornell.edu (Robert Cooper) (01/31/91)
The following Tech Report is available via anonymous FTP from Cornell.
This paper gives much of the motivation for the Isis redesign effort
that we are now undertaking, focusing on the semantics of groups
and multicast. Here's the abstract:
Programming with Process Groups:
Group and Multicast Semantics
Kenneth P. Birman Robert Cooper Barry Gleeson
TR-91-1185
January 29, 1991
Process groups are a natural tool for distributed programming, and are
increasingly important in distributed computing environments. However,
there is little agreement on the most appropriate semantics for process
group membership and group communication. These issues are of special
importance in the Isis system, a toolkit for distributed programming. Isis
supports several styles of process group, and a collection of group
communication protocols spanning a range of atomicity and ordering
properties. This flexibility makes Isis adaptable to a variety of
applications, but is also a source of complexity that limits performance.
This paper reports on a new architecture that arose from an effort to
simplify Isis process group semantics. Our findings include a refined
notion of how the clients of a group should be treated, what the properties
of a multicast primitive should be when systems contain large numbers of
overlapping groups, and a new construct called the {\em causality domain}.
A system based on this architecture is now being implemented in
collaboration with the Chorus and Mach projects.
You can obtain this via anonymous FTP from Cornell. The report is stored as
compressed postscript under the names pub/TR91-1185.ps.Z and
pub/groupsemantics.ps.Z . Shortly you will also be able to get hardcopy of
the report US Mailed to you by sending Email to our secretary, Maureen
Robinson (reen@cs.cornell.edu).
-- Robert Cooper
FTP details:
prompt% ftp cu-arpa.cs.cornell.edu
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220 cu-arpa.cs.cornell.edu FTP server (Version 4.107 Fri May 1 13:38:11 PDT 1987
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Name (cu-arpa.cs.cornell.edu:rcbc): anonymous
331 Guest login ok, send ident as password.
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230 Guest login ok, access restrictions apply.
ftp> cd pub
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ftp> binary
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ftp> get TR91-1185.ps.Z
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for TR91-1185.ps.Z (94615 bytes).
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