Selected sections of this report were published in the Proceedings of The International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), Washington, DC, June, 2002.
In this paper we propose a novel abstraction, Semantic View Synchrony (SVS), that exploits the application's semantics to cope with high throughput applications. This is achieved by allowing some messages to be dropped while still preserving consistency when new views are installed. Thus, SVS inherits the elegance of view synchronous communication. The paper describes how SVS can be implemented and illustrates its usefulness in the context of distributed multi-player games.
Also available extended report(gzip postscript), (pdf)
Luís Rodrigues