New applications for group computing

Abstract

Group computing (GC) encompasses two important paradigms: membership and multicast communication. So far, these paradigms are best understood in two domains: fault-tolerant applications (replicated services), and data dissemination applications (e.g. stock trading). Yet GC also has potential in many other areas of distributed applications. In this short paper we will discuss some new application domains, what approaches one may take when trying to apply GC here, and what implications this has for the GC paradigms themselves. In particular, we will discuss how our own new GC system, Horus [vRBC+92, vRHB94], addresses these issues. The application domains on which we focus are parallel computing, multimedia systems, and real-time control systems.