[erlang-questions] models for replicated/distributed processors

[Miles Fidelman]

Hi Folks,

I'm trying to think through various approaches to fault-tolerance for an 
actor-based system architecture - generally around the notion of 
replicated copies of actors operating on different nodes.

Two questions to the assembled wisdom:

1. Has anybody done any work with replicated, synchronized processes 
spread across multiple erlang nodes?  If so, can you share anything 
about architectural concepts?  (Pointers to papers or slide decks would 
be much appreciated).

2. A more specific question:  I notice that spawn-link has a from that 
allows creating a linked process on a different node - spawn_link(Node, 
Module, Function, Args) -> pid() - which seems like a good start on 
building supervision trees across nodes.  But... there doesn't seem to 
be an equivalent form of spawn_monitor - seems like spawn_opt/5 can be 
used instead, but sort of curious about the omission.  Anybody know the 
story?

Thanks,

Miles Fidelman

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra