Abstract
The protocols of Chap. 12 represent a new kind of building block from which a wide variety of sophisticated systems can be constructed. Here, we do so, exploring the needed mechanisms that will let us take the step from a world of protocols that live in isolation to a full-fledged toolkit for implementing applications. When the properties of the model are combined with these primitives, we will say that a virtually synchronous execution environment results (see Birman and Joseph 1987a, 1987b; Birman and van Renesse 1994). Our treatment here is detailed but not fully formalized; a more mathematical treatment is provided in Appendix A.
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Notes
- 1.
In some systems this is interpreted so that if a process fails, but its failure is not reported promptly, it is considered to have received multicasts that would have been delivered to it had it still been operational.
- 2.
In fact, Spread goes further and implements a single non-partitionable “group,” within which the user’s process groups are actually supported as subgroups. A multicast, for example, is performed by multicasting to the whole group but then filtering messages on arrival so only the appropriate subset of group members receive a copy. This proves to be an especially easy model to implement and performance is good. On the other hand, the “deliver, then filter and discard” approach imposes considerable overhead if most messages are destined for just a small subset of processes.
- 3.
Interested readers may also want to read about log-based recovery techniques, which we do not cover in this book because these techniques have not been applied in many real systems. Alvisi gives a very general log-based recovery algorithm and reviews other work in the area in his Ph.D. dissertation and in a paper with Marzullo.
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Birman, K.P. (2012). The Virtual Synchrony Execution Model. In: Guide to Reliable Distributed Systems. Texts in Computer Science. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2416-0_14
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