World wide failures

The one issue that unites almost all approaches to distributed computing is the need to know whether certain components in the system have failed or are otherwise unavailable. When designing and building systems that need to function at a global scale, failure management needs to be considered a fundamental building block. This paper describes the development of a system-independent failure management service, which allows systems and applications to incorporate accurate detection of failed processes, nodes and networks, without the need for making compromises in their particular design.