Abstract Moving the Ensemble Communication System to NT and Wolfpack †

Cornell University has developed a group communications and membership management tool, called the Ensemble system, which provides the basis for introducing guarantees such as reliability, high availability, fault-tolerance, consistency, security and real-time responsiveness into applications that run on clustered parallel computers or high speed networks. Ensemble tools are flexible, extremely transparent, and achieve high performance. Our development started under Unix in 1995, but by 1996 had enlarged to include NT as a primary target. This paper reviews Ensemble and then discusses the technical issues that arose when repositioning it to fit naturally and perform well under NT.