Group communication - Introduction

People get together in groups whenever concerted action can be expected to provide gains in efficiency or to improve the chances of success in some endeavor. Similarly, groups can be used in distributed computing systems to help master the complexity of large applications or to help provide non-functional properties, such as availability or security. The full benefits of the group concept, however, can be reaped only if we know how to set up and coordinate groups of processes that work together to fulfill a common purpose, like sharing a computational load, increasing performance, or providing a fault-tolerant service. This article presents some of the current ideas on how such groups can be created and managed.