Overview of the Horus Project Overview of the Horus project Five years ago, Kenneth Birman and Robbert van Renesse started the activity that ultimately lead to the design of Horus. At the outset, the project was perceived as a redesign of the Isis group communication system. Perhaps the best general overviews of Horus can be found in the April 1996 issue of Communications of the ACM, and in the May 1996 issue of Scientific American.
Many additional papers are available in our online technical reports area.
If an application contains multiple subsystems with differing needs, it can create multiple superimposed groups with different properties in each. Users who wish to treat Horus as a prebuilt system can take advantage of its virtual synchrony model to introduce replication, coordination, and fault-tolerance into their applications. Horus is suitable for building high performance groupware applications and we are now working on real-time applications, notably in the area of telecommunications switch management. For users who wish to develop new groupware protocols, Horus can be viewed as a group communication environment rather than as a collection of prebuilt groupware solutions. Horus protocols are structured like stacks of Lego-blocks, hence new protocols can be developed by adding new layers or by recombining existing ones.