Coinmunication in the Raid Distributed Database System

This paper identifies the basic functions required from a communication subsystem in order to support a distributed, reliable, reconfigurable, and replicated database environment. These functions include: reliable multicast, remote procedure calls (RPC) , inexpensive datagram services, and efficient local interprocess communication (IPC). Data obtained via a series of experiments that measure the performance of several local interprocess communication methods, a kernel-level multicasting facility, the Raid system running on different network configurations, and a Push multicast program has been included. Push is a tool that allows us to conduct measurements by supplementing and/or modifying the communication facilities in the operating system kernel while it is running.