Abstract

Group communication is used in many file systems and storage controller systems. Ideally, there could be a single group communication system that serves the needs of all these various projects---software that was built once, tested once, and deployed everywhere. In reality, each project builds its own custom group services component. There are three reasons for this: most systems require only a few group communication features (but not the same ones); the scalability requirements differ by several orders of magnitude between systems; and most storage systems have unique programming environment requirements. These differences in requirements imply that group communication is a toolkit that needs to be built differently each time to fit the particular target system requirements.

Citations