Abstract
In distributed systems, high service availability can be achieved by replicating the service state. Group communication services, such as membership and atomic broadcast, have been proposed to solve the problem of maintaining state replica consistency. Group membership achieves ‘consistent’ views of the history of server failures and recoveries, while atomic broadcast achieves ‘consistent’ views of the history of service state updates. We examine what ‘consistency’ means in synchronous (hard real-time) as well as in asynchronous (soft real-time) systems.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
G. Alvarez, F. Cristian, and S. Mishra. On-demand asynchronous atomic broadcast. In 5th IFIP Working Conference on Dependable Computing for Critical Applications, Urbana, Illinois, Sept. 1995.
Y. Amir, L. Moser, M. Melliar-Smith, D. Agarwal, and P. Ciarfella. Fast message ordering and membership using a logical token-pasing ring. In Proceedings of the 13th International IEEE Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, pages 551–560, Pittsburgh, PA, May 1993.
Y. Amir, L. Moser, P. Melliar-Smith, D. Agarwal, and P. Ciarfella. Fast message ordering and membership using a logical token-passing ring. In Proceedings of Thirteenth International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, pages 551–560, Pittsburgh, PA, May 1993.
E. Anceaume, B. Charron-Bost, P. Minet, and S. Toueg. On the formal specification of group membership services. Technical Report 95-1534, CS, Cornell Univ., August 1995.
O. Babaoglu, M. Baker, R. Davoli, and L. Giachini. Relacs: a communication infrastructure for constructing reliable applications. Technical Report CS94-15, Laboratory for Computer Science, The University of Bologna, 1994.
K. Birman, A. Schiper, and P. Stephenson. Lightweight causal and atomic group multicast. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 9(3):272–314, Aug 1991.
R. Carr. The Tandem global update protocol. Tandem Systems Review, Jun 1985.
D. Chandra, V. Hadzilacos, S. Toueg, and B. Charron-Bost. On the impossibility of group membership. Technical Report 95-1548, CS, Cornell Univ., October 1995.
J. Chang and N. Maxemchuk. Reliable broadcast protocols. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 2(3):251–273, Aug 1984.
F. Cristian. Asynchronous atomic broadcast. IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin, 33(9):115–116, Feb 1991. Presented at the First IEEE Workshop on Management of Replicated Data, Houston, TX, (Nov 1990).
F. Cristian. Reaching agreement on processor-group membership in synchronous distributed systems. Distributed Computing, 4:175–187, 1991. Early version: FTCS-18, 1988, Kyoto.
F. Cristian. Understanding fault-tolerant distributed systems. Communications of ACM, 34(2):56–78, Feb 1991.
F. Cristian, H. Aghili, R. Strong, and D. Dolev. Atomic broadcast: From simple message diffusion to Byzantine agreement. Information and Computation, 118:158–179, April 1995. Early version: FTCS15, June 1985.
F. Cristian, B. Dancey, and J. Dehn. Fault-tolerance in the Advanced Automation System. In Proceedings of the Twentieth Symposium on Fault-Tolerant Computing, pages 6–17, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK, Jun 1990.
F. Cristian, R. de Beijer, and S. Mishra. A performance comparison of asynchronous atomic broadcast protocols. Distributed Systems Engineering, 1(4):177–201, Jun 1994.
F. Cristian and S. Mishra. The Pinwheel asynchronous atomic broadcast protocols. In Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Autonomous Decentralized Systems, Phoenix, AZ, Mar 1995.
F. Cristian and F. Schmuck. Agreeing on processor-group membership in asynchronous distributed systems. Technical Report CSE95-428, UCSD, 1995.
P. Ezhilchelvan, R. Macedo, and S. Shrivastava. Newtop: a fault-tolerant group communication protocol. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Distributed Systems, Vancouver, Canada., May 1995.
C. Fetzer and F. Cristian. On the possibility of consensus in asynchronous systems. In 1995 Pacific Rim International Symposium on Fault-Tolerant Systems, Newport Beach, CA, Dec 1995.
M. J. Fischer, N. A. Lynch, and M. S. Paterson. Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process. Journal of the ACM, 32(2):374–382, Apr 1985.
V. Hadzilacos and S. Toueg. Fault-tolerant broadcasts and related problems. In S. Mullender, editor, Distributed Systems, pages 97–145. Addison-Wesley, 1993.
F. Kaashoek and A. Tanenbaum. Group communication in the Amoeba distributed system. In Proc. 11th Int. Conf. on Distributed Computing Systems, pages 222–230, May 1991.
D. Malki, Y. Amir, D. Dolev, and S. Kramer. The Transis approach to high availability cluster communication. Technical Report CS94-14, Computer Science Department, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, 1994.
S. Mishra, L. Peterson, and R. Schlichting. Consul: A communication substrate for fault-tolerant distributed programs. Distributed Systems Engineering Journal, 1993.
Z. Ping and J. Hooman. Formal specification and compositional verification of an atomic broadcast protocol. Real-Time Systems, 9:119–145, 1995.
M. Satyanarayanan, J. Kistler, P. Kumar, M. Okasaki, E. Siegel, and D. Steere. Coda: A highly available file system for a distributed workstation environment. IEEE Transactions on Computers, 39(4), Apr 1990.
A. Schiper and A. Sandoz. Uniform reliable multicast in a virtually synchronous environment. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, pages 561–568, May 1993.
R. Strong, D. Skeen, F. Cristian, and H. Aghili. Handshake protocols. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, pages 521–528, Berlin, Sep 1987.
R. van Renesse, K. Birman, and T. Hickey. Design and performance of Horus: a lightweight group communication system. TR 94-1442, Cornell Univ, dept. of Computer Science, Aug 1994.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Cristian, F. (1996). On the semantics of group communication. In: Jonsson, B., Parrow, J. (eds) Formal Techniques in Real-Time and Fault-Tolerant Systems. FTRTFT 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1135. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-61648-9_31
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-61648-9_31
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-61648-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-70653-3
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive