GROUP COMMUNICATION IN THE AMOEBA DISTRIBUTED
M. Frans, Kaashoek Andrew, S. Tanenbaum · 1991
Many applications can profit from broadcast communication, but few operating systems provide primitives that make broadcast communication available to user applications. In this paper we introduce primitives for broadcast communication that have been integrated with the Amoeba distributed operating system. The semantics of the broadcast primitives are simple and easy to understand, but are still powerful. Our primitives. for example, guarantee global ordering of broadcast messages. The proposed primitives are also efficient: a reliable broadcast can be done in just slightly more than two messages, so, the performance is comparable to a remote procedure call. In addition, the primitives are flexible: user applications can, for example, trade performance against fault-tolerance.