REPLICATED PROCEDURE CALL.

Abstract

A new mechanism for constructing highly available distributed programs is described. It combines remote procedure call with replication of program modules for fault tolerance. The set of replicas of a module is called a troupe. In a program constructed from troupes, what appears to the programmer as a single inter-module procedure call results in a replicated procedure call. A distributed program constructed in this way will continue to function as long as at least one member of each troupe survives. The semantics of replicated procedure calls and troupes are defined and algorithms are presented that support these semantics.