Programming distributed systems with group_IO

Abstract

This paper describes Group _IO, a software library written in Ada which facilitates the construction of distributed applications by means of the group paradigm, an abstraction which considers a set of processes as an individual entity. Group _IO provides support for replicated as well as cooperative groups. Group _IO offers a straightforward interface to reliable, atomic, causal, and uniform multicast services, and it allows client-server interactions where the client may be a process group. It relies on an own consensus protocol to implement the uniform broadcast protocols. Group _IO provides suport for the client/server group (1 - to - M) communication, client group/server (N - to - 1) and client group/group server (N - to - M) communication. Group _IO is the basis on which the programming language Drago [MAGA00] has been implemented.