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The work reported was supported by ARPA/ONR grants N00014-92-J-1866 and N00014-91-J-1219, the NSF grant CCR-9003440, the DARPA/NSF grant CCR-9014363, the NASA/DARPA grant NAG-2-893, and the AFOSR grant F49620-94-1-0198. E-mail addresses for authors: rvr@cs.cornell.edu, takako@cs.cornell.edu, ken@cs.cornell.edu. The authors are just a subset of the full membership in the Horus project; other participants are cited in the acknowledgements.

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By picking the oldest group member, this election can be performed without exchange of messages. Notice that the concept of ``oldest'' might not be meaningful in an execution model where different processes observe group views in different orders or with gaps. In Horus, the virtual synchrony model enables us to make statements like this in a way that is rigorously meaningful.