Multicast Facility

[Frances Liu]

I am working on a fault-tolerant remote execution manager system on
network of SUN workstations. This system allows users to replicate
processes on different nodes and uses  pipe and socket for communication
among processes.  The communication is pair-wise between processes and is
rather inefficient when a parent process needs to communicate with several
replicate child processes simultaneously.

We would like to implement a multicast facility in order to speedup
communication among workstations.  However the problem is the fact that
the remote execution manager system is built entirely in the application
layer. We are not supposed to change the unix kernel in the process of
implementing this multicast facility.

Is there anyone out there who has any ideas how it can be done?  I am also
interested in the algorithms and protocols that ensure reliability and
atomicity of broadcast messages.

Any ideas, comments and suggestions which relevant to the above issues
are welcome.

Thank you very much.

Frances
-- 
Frances Liu 
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