I've been reading about 3PC in a text book, but there aren't any diagrams or examples, so I found one on wikipedia that I posted below. My question is, what does it mean by cohorts? There is no mention of cohorts in the textbook and I don't see anywhere in the wiki page explaining what it is. Is it simply another word for participants?  Thanks for any help.Here's the wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-phase_commit_protocol
Three-Phase Commit (3PC) question
database;protocol;transaction
The cohorts in this case is the everyone who is not the coordinator. If you had 2 processes (a) and (b) then one would be the cohort and the other the coordinator, if you had (a), (b), and (c) then (c) might be coordinator with (a) and (b) as cohorts.