Exploring process groups for reliability, availability and serviceability of terascale computing systems

This paper presents various aspects of reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) systems as they relate to group communication service, including re-liable and total order multicast/broadcast, virtual synchrony, and failure detection. While the issue of availability, particularly high availability using replication-based architectures has recently received upsurge research interests, much still have to be done in understanding the basic underlying concepts for achieving RAS systems, especially in high-end and high performance computing (HPC) communities. Various attributes of group communication servic and the prototype of symmetric active replication follow-ing ideas utilized in the Newtop protocol will be dis