Distributed Programming with Associative Broadcase

We propose a new model for distributed programming , called Associative Broadcast, that achieves a high level of communication abstraction by using as its fundamental mode of communication a form of logical broadcast. Each message contains a predicate that speciies the local states of the objects that are to receive the message, rather than their identi-ers. Message delivery is asynchronous and requires no knowledge of the global state. Associative Broadcast exploits the broadcasting capabilities of distributed systems, and enables straightforward speciication of state-based communication. We use state-based communication to obtain a new solution to the partitioned-network consistency problem in distributed databases.