Broadcast

[Richard Carlsson]

Hi everybody! I have a little poll for you about message
broadcast (multicast) protocols, that I hope you will respond
to if you think it relates to you in any way:

  1. Do you use broadcasts (multicasts) in any application today?
     If so:
         a) What form? (reliable? total/causal order? "safe"? etc.)
         b) What broadcast implementation?
         c) What application are you using it in?
         d) Do you have problems with scalability or other things?

  2. Are you explicitly not using broadcasts in some application
     because of some known problem with existing broadcast
     implementations? If so, what are those problems, and what
     methods are you using instead?

  3. Are there problems which you think you could solve more easily
     if you had access to a better reliable, scalable broadcast?
     If so, what number of processes do you think you would need
     to be able to scale to?

  4. Do you have a program that would make a good benchmark for
     testing message broadcasts?

The reason I'm asking is that I am considering letting a student do a
master's thesis on the subject of probabilistic broadcast with an
implementation in Erlang. We need to know more about possible practical
applications and opportunities for benchmarking.

	/Richard


Richard Carlsson (richardc@REDACTED)   (This space intentionally left blank.)
E-mail: Richard.Carlsson@REDACTED	WWW: http://user.it.uu.se/~richardc/
 "Having users is like optimization: the wise course is to delay it."
   -- Paul Graham