The ISIS Project: Real Experience with a Fault Tolerant Programming System

Abstract

The ISIS project has developed a distributed programming toolkit and a collection of higher level applications based on these tools. ISIS is now in use at more than 300 locations world-wide. Here, we discuss the lessons (and surprises) gained from this experience with the real world. ISIS differs from other process-group-based systems because it integrates group membership changes with communication, and because of the multicase communication primitives we call CBCAST and ABCAST. Virtual synchrony underlies those aspects of ISIS that have been most successful. The approach makes it possible for a process to infer the state and actions of remote process using local state information and events that have been locally observed. Our experiences confirm that using this property, one can often arrive at elegant, efficient solutions to problems that would be difficult to formulate-and extremely complex to implement-on a bare message-passing system. (rrh)

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jul 01, 1990
Accession Number
ADA227159

Entities

People

  • Ken Birman
  • Robert M Cooper

Organizations

  • Cornell University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Communication Systems
  • Computer Graphics
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Control Systems
  • Embedded Systems
  • Environment
  • Fault Tolerance
  • Graphics
  • Language
  • Mainframe Computers
  • Networks
  • Operating Systems
  • Reliability

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Educational Psychology
  • Fault Tolerant Diagnosis of Black and White Balloon Isolation Tests Using ¥.
  • Parallel and Distributed Computing.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML