Abstract
Protocol design is just part of the challenge when building distributed systems: our protocols also need to be presented in an easily-used form that lends itself to high performance and scalability. This chapter discusses some of the challenges. The Isis2 system, available for use by readers of this text, is an example of one embodiment of the ideas we explore here, but we’ll also look at several other approaches, exploring some of the benefits and limitations of each.
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Notes
- 1.
It is common to say that a message is stable when processing has completed and associated information can be garbage collected. Horus standardizes the handling of stability information, but leaves the actual semantics of stability to the user. Thus, an application for which stability means “logged to disk” can share this Horus functionality with an application for which stability means “displayed on the screen.”
- 2.
This protocol differs from the Total protocol in the Trans/Total (see Moser et al. 1996) project in that the Horus protocol only rotates the token among the current set of senders, while the Trans/Total protocol rotates the token among all members.
- 3.
This version of Horus ultimately evolved into the Ensemble system, but the two are not identical. Ensemble was a complete rewrite by Mark Hayden and Ohad Rodeh.
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Birman, K.P. (2012). Software Architectures for Group Communication. In: Guide to Reliable Distributed Systems. Texts in Computer Science. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2416-0_17
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