Group communication in the Amoeba distributed operating system

Primitives for broadcast communication that have been integrated with the Amoeba distributed operating system are introduced. The semantics of the broadcast primitives are simple and easy to understand, but are still powerful. The proposed primitives, for example, guarantee global ordering of broadcast messages. The proposed primitives are also efficient: a reliable broadcast can be done in just slightly more than two messages, so the performance is comparable to a remote procedure call. In addition, the primitives are flexible; user applications can, for example, trade performance against fault-tolerance