Fast Group Communication for Standard Workstations

This paper presents a Group Communication Service suitable for standard workstations. The communication service is designed to take advantage of the technology offered by modern standard Local Area Networks and offers a very versatile multi-primitive interface to its users. The authors focus on the design and implementation of the communication service, and of the software modules necessary to exploit specific network and operating system properties. Additionally performance results are given and evaluated in the context of comparable systems. 1. Introduction Increasing use of distributed systems, with the corresponding decentralization of activities, stimulates the need for structuring those activities around groups of participants, for reasons of consistency, userfriendliness, performance and dependability. The concept appears intuitively in all flavors of distributed actions: when participants cooperate in an activity (e.g. management of a partioned database, shared document proces..