An object group in a distributed system is a consortium of singleton objects joined together to cooperate on a common mission, for example, a replicated file server group designed to improve the resilence of stored information, or a vector processor group working collectively to serve as a highly parallel array processor.
These object groups are static or dynamic depending on whether their membership lists may change during the execution period. Dynamic configuration of members in group provides flexible binding of services to objects.
Dynamic group configuration mechanism in this thesis consider a large scale distributed system based on the model of Open Distributed Processing.
Dynamic group configuration mechanism proposed in this thesis provides the following characteristics. :
* Seperation of the configuration epoch from the life time of group: this state needs to support the basic characteristic that group must not act until it satisfy its proper conditions.
* Join by interface match-making; this mechanism support the flexible join to group in distributed environment.
This paper proposes the state transition model of group, primitives for group configuration, and implement on the ANSA Testbench which is a prototype based on the model of Open Distributed Processing Support Environment.
