Group membership and wide-area master-worker computations

Group communications systems have been designed to provide an infrastructure for fault-tolerance in distributed systems, including wide-area systems. In our work on master-worker computation for GriPhyN, which is a large project in the area of the computational grid, we asked the question should we build our wide-area master-worker computation using wide-area group communications? This paper explains why we decided doing so was not a good idea.