Describes the timewheel group communication system, which has been designed for a timed asynchronous distributed system model. All protocols in the timewheel group communication system have been designed to be fail-aware in the sense that a process can detect, at any point in time, whether any of its properties is violated. Although these protocols have been designed to operate in an asynchronous distributed computing environment, they provide timeliness properties. The timewheel group communication system provides nine group communication semantics that a user can dynamically choose from while broadcasting an update. This system provides high throughput, fast delivery and stability times, uses a small number of messages per update broadcast, and evenly distributes the processing load among group members.