An experimental comparison of remote procedure call and group communication

Abstract

Unlike many other operating systems, Amoeba is a distributed operating system that provides group communication (i.e., one-to-many communication). We will discuss design issues for group communication, Amoeba's group system calls, and the protocols to implement group communication. To demonstrate that group communication is a useful abstraction, we will describe a design and implementation of a fault-tolerant directory service. We discuss two versions of the directory service: one with Non-Volatile RAM (NVRAM) and one without NVRAM. We will give performance figures for both implementations.