pat@cs.cornell.edu (Pat Stephenson) (04/14/90)
I've put a postscript copy of a paper called "Fast Causal Multicast" in pub/bypass.ps on cu-arpa.cs.cornell.edu, for anonymous ftp. It's by Ken Birman, Andre Schiper and myself (Pat Stephenson). It's also available as Cornell CS Department tech report TR-1105. 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. If you're interested but can't ftp this, get in touch with me and we'll see what we can work out. Pat Stephenson pat@cs.cornell.edu