Partitionable Virtual Synchrony Using Extended Virtual Synchrony
John L. Schultz · 2001
View-oriented group communication systems (GCSs) are powerful tools for building distributed applications. Over the past fifteen years, group communication researchers developed a multitude of group communication semantics and implementations. Today, researchers commonly design their group communication algorithms on top of simple existing services such as a network membership service or a reliable FIFO multicast framework. A natural extension of this idea is to implement one set of group communication semantics using another. This approach is not usually utilized due to the expensive overhead of running one set of group communication algorithms on top of another. This thesis argues that the Extended Virtual Synchrony (EVS) model of group communication, implemented using a client-daemon architecture, is of such high performance that the overhead of constructing another group communication model on top of it is acceptable. It demonstrates that the strong safety properties provided by the EVS model can be leveraged to create very simple algorithms that implement more