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The term Group Communication System (GCS) refers to a
software platform that implements some form of
group communication Communication in small groups consists of three or more people who share a common goal and communicate collectively to achieve it. During small group communication, interdependent participants analyze data, evaluate the nature of the problem(s), dec ...
. Examples of group communication systems include
IS-IS
Intermediate System to Intermediate System (IS-IS, also written ISIS) is a routing protocol designed to move information efficiently within a computer network, a group of physically connected computers or similar devices. It accomplishes this b ...
,
Spread Toolkit
The Spread Toolkit is a computer software package that provides a high performance group communication system that is resilient to faults across local and wide area networks. Spread functions as a unified message bus for distributed applicatio ...
,
Appia framework,
QuickSilver, and
IBM's group services component. Message queue systems are somewhat similar.
Group communication systems commonly provide specific guarantees about the total ordering of messages, such as if the sender of a message receives it back from the GCS, then it is certain that it has been delivered to all other nodes in the system. This property is useful when constructing
data replication systems.
Inter-process communication