System Support for Object Replication in Distributed Systems

Distributed systems are composed of a collection of cooperating but failure prone system comp onents The numb er of components in such systems is often large and despite low probabilities of any particular component failing the likelihood that there will be at least a small numb er of failures within the system at a given time is high. Therefore distributed systems must b e able to withstand partial failures By b eing resilient to partial failures a distributed system b ecomes more able to o er a dep endable service and therefore more useful.

Replication is a well known technique used to mask partial failures and increase reliability in distributed computer systems However replication management requires sophisticated distributed control algorithms and is therefore a lab our intensive and error prone task.

This dissertation describes an approach to implementing system support for object replication.