A group membership service for large-scale grids

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a decentralized group membership service that can be incorporated into existing grid middleware to make it more reliable. This service includes a flexible failure detector that adapts dynamically to changing network conditions and can be configured with a number of failure recovery strategies. Moreover, it disseminates information about membership changes (new processes, failures, etc.) in a scalable and efficient manner. We conducted a preliminary evaluation of the proposed service by simulating a grid with up to 140 nodes distributed across three domains separated by a wide-area network. This evaluation showed that the proposed service performs well both in the absence and in the presence of process failures.