Exploiting replication in distributed systems

Techniques are examined for replicating data and execution in directly distributed systems: systems in which multiple processes interact directly with one another while continuously respecting constraints on their joint behavior. Directly distributed systems are often required to solve difficult problems, ranging from management of replicated data to dynamic reconfiguration in response to failures. It is shown that these problems reduce to more primitive, order-based consistency problems, which can be solved using primitives such as the reliable broadcast protocols. Moreover, given a system that implements reliable broadcast primitives, a flexible set of high-level tools can be provided for building a wide variety of directly distributed application programs

HT-Paxos: High Throughput State-Machine Replication Protocol for Large Clustered Data Centers

Paxos is a prominent theory of state machine replication. Recent data intensive Systems those implement state machine replication generally require high throughput. Earlier versions of Paxos as few of them are classical Paxos, fast Paxos and generalized Paxos have a major focus on fault tolerance and latency but lacking in terms of throughput and scalability. A major reason for this is the heavyweight leader. Through offloading the leader, we can further increase throughput of the system. Ring Paxos, Multi Ring Paxos and S-Paxos are few prominent attempts in this direction for clustered data centers. In this paper, we are proposing HT-Paxos, a variant of Paxos that one is the best suitable for any large clustered data center. HT-Paxos further offloads the leader very significantly and hence increases the throughput and scalability of the system. While at the same time, among high throughput state-machine replication protocols, HT-Paxos provides reasonably low latency and response time

Maintaining consistency in distributed systems

In systems designed as assemblies of independently developed components, concurrent access to data or data structures normally arises within individual programs, and is controlled using mutual exclusion constructs, such as semaphores and monitors. Where data is persistent and/or sets of operation are related to one another, transactions or linearizability may be more appropriate. Systems that incorporate cooperative styles of distributed execution often replicate or distribute data within groups of components. In these cases, group oriented consistency properties must be maintained, and tools based on the virtual synchrony execution model greatly simplify the task confronting an application developer. All three styles of distributed computing are likely to be seen in future systems - often, within the same application. This leads us to propose an integrated approach that permits applications that use virtual synchrony with concurrent objects that respect a linearizability constraint, and vice versa. Transactional subsystems are treated as a special case of linearizability

Byzantine Fault Tolerance for Nondeterministic Applications

All practical applications contain some degree of nondeterminism. When such applications are replicated to achieve Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT), their nondeterministic operations must be controlled to ensure replica consistency. To the best of our knowledge, only the most simplistic types of replica nondeterminism have been dealt with. Furthermore, there lacks a systematic approach to handling common types of nondeterminism. In this paper, we propose a classification of common types of replica nondeterminism with respect to the requirement of achieving Byzantine fault tolerance, and describe the design and implementation of the core mechanisms necessary to handle such nondeterminism within a Byzantine fault tolerance framework.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of the 3rd IEEE International Symposium on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing, 200