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Collaborative Group Membership

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Abstract

In this paper we present a novel approach to fault-tolerant group membership for use predominantly in collaborative computing environments. As an exemplar, we use the Collaborative Computing Transport Layer which offers reliable atomic multicast capabilities for use in collaborative environments such as the Collaborative Computing Frameworks (CCF). Specific design goals of the approach are the elimination of processing overhead due to heartbeats, support for partial failures and extensibility. These goals are satisfied in an approach, termed Collaborative Group Membership (CGM), which uses a quiescent weak failure detector and two election based algorithms to form consensus on the membership of a failing group. Failure detection operates through a reliable multicast primitive and as such eliminates the need for explicit keep-alive packets; thus in a failure free environment, CGM imposes no overhead.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, The University of Reading, United Kingdom, RG6 6AY

    James S. Pascoe & Roger J. Loader

  2. Math & Computer Science, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, 30322

    Vaidy S. Sunderam

Authors
  1. James S. Pascoe
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  2. Roger J. Loader
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  3. Vaidy S. Sunderam
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Pascoe, J.S., Loader, R.J. & Sunderam, V.S. Collaborative Group Membership. The Journal of Supercomputing 22, 55–68 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1014306520634

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1014306520634

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