System for managing membership of a group of processors in a distributed computing environment

System managing membership of a group of processors in a distributed computing environment. Specific actions are identified and performed in order to manage the group membership. A processor requests to join the group of processors and thus, is added to the group. Similarly, processors may request to leave the group or may fail and then are removed from the group. The group of members also receives multicasts initiated from one member of the group to other members of the group. Additionally, each group of processors within a distributed computing environment has a group leader that controls the actions being performed for the group of members.