Design and Performance of Horus: A Lightweight Group Communications System
Robbert van Renesse, Takako Hickey, Ken Birman · 1994
The Horus project seeks to develop a communication system addressing the requirements of a wide variety of distributed applications. Horus implements the group communications model providing (among others) unreliable or reliable FIFO, causal, or total group multicasts. It is extensively layered and highly reconfigurable allowing applications to only pay for services they use. This architecture enables groups with different communication needs to coexist in a single system. The approach permits experimentation with new communication properties and incremental extension of the system, and enables us to support a variety of application-oriented interfaces. Our initial experiments show good performance. 1 Introduction In the last several years, we have seen a growing use of group communication primitives in distributed and/or parallel applications. Physically distributed systems (such as stock markets and factories) employ group communications to disseminate information to large numbers o...