TRANSPARENT CONSISTENT SEMI-ACTIVE AND PASSIVE REPLICATION OF MULTITHREADED APPLICATION PROGRAMS

摘要

A method and system for transparent consistent active replication of multithreaded application programs is described. At each replica, control messages that contain mutex ordering information indicating the order in which threads in the replicas claim mutexes are multicast, and the control messages are delivered using a multicast group communication protocol that delivers the messages in an order that determines the order in which the operating system's thread library grants the claims of mutexes to the threads in the replicas. Because the replicas receive the same messages in the same source order, the corresponding threads in the different replicas are granted their corresponding claims to the corresponding mutexes in the same order, maintaining strong replica consistency.