The inter-group router approach to scalable group composition

This paper examines the problem of building scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems from collections of com-municating process groups, while maintaining well-defined end-to-end delivery semantics. We propose a new architec-ture which supports modular group composition by provid-ing a distinction between intra-group and inter-group com-munication. With this architecture, multiple group commu-nication protocols and end-to-end delivery semantics can be used in a single system. These features reduce the com-plexity of ordering messages in a group composition, result-ing in enhanced scalability. Finally, we present simulation results comparing the performance of a group composition using our architecture to that of a single process group. 1