isca97 abstract

This paper describes results from a project designed to study the feasibility of constructing dependable distributed applications on top of existing distributed computing platforms. Most existing distributed systems are asynchronous in nature and, as a result, cannot provide several important properties such as real-time responsiveness and consensus that are needed in a large number of dependable distributed applications. We study a new distributed system model in which a distributed system is seen as alternating between synchronous and asynchronous behaviors. Important properties such as real-time responsiveness and consensus can be provided when the system behaves synchronously. We show that the lengths of synchronous behavior periods are much larger than the lengths of asynchronous behavior periods in three different and common distributed computing environments. Dependable distributed applications can in fact be constructed in these distributed computing environments.