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Adding Group Communication and Fault-Tolerance to CORBA


Silvano Maffeis

maffeis@acm.org
Department of Computer Science
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

Abstract

Groupware and fault-tolerant distributed systems stimulate the need for structuring activities around object-groups and reliable multicast communication. The object-group abstraction permits to treat a collection of network-objects as if they were a single object; clients can invoke operations on object-groups without needing to know the exact membership of the group. Object-groups mainly serve to increase reliability through replication, performance through parallelism, or to distribute data from one sender to a large number of receivers efficiently. This paper describes how object-groups and reliable multicast communication can be added to a CORBA compliant Object Request Broker. It also presents ELECTRA | a CORBA Object Request Broker whose architecture is pervaded by the group concept.


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