Replication within atomic actions and conversations: a case study in fault-tolerance duality

Abstract

Recently a duality mapping for fault-tolerant system structures was proposed by the authors (1985). Two canonical models of distributed fault-tolerant systems have been constructed and shown to be duals of each other. One model incorporates objects and atomic actions as the entities for program construction, whereas the second model uses communicating processes with conversations. As a consequence of the duality, techniques and mechanisms which have been developed within the domain of just one of the models can be mapped and applied to the other model. This point is illustrated by mapping some well-known object replication techniques developed within the context of an object and actions model to the communicating process model, thereby revealing some interesting process replication techniques.<>