279 research outputs found
Generalized Paxos Made Byzantine (and Less Complex)
One of the most recent members of the Paxos family of protocols is
Generalized Paxos. This variant of Paxos has the characteristic that it departs
from the original specification of consensus, allowing for a weaker safety
condition where different processes can have a different views on a sequence
being agreed upon. However, much like the original Paxos counterpart,
Generalized Paxos does not have a simple implementation. Furthermore, with the
recent practical adoption of Byzantine fault tolerant protocols, it is timely
and important to understand how Generalized Paxos can be implemented in the
Byzantine model. In this paper, we make two main contributions. First, we
provide a description of Generalized Paxos that is easier to understand, based
on a simpler specification and the pseudocode for a solution that can be
readily implemented. Second, we extend the protocol to the Byzantine fault
model
Application Aware for Byzantine Fault Tolerance
Driven by the need for higher reliability of many distributed systems, various replication-based fault tolerance technologies have been widely studied. A prominent technology is Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT). BFT can help achieve high availability and trustworthiness by ensuring replica consistency despite the presence of hardware failures and malicious faults on a small portion of the replicas. However, most state-of-the-art BFT algorithms are designed for generic stateful applications that require the total ordering of all incoming requests and the sequential execution of such requests. In this dissertation research, we recognize that a straightforward application of existing BFT algorithms is often inappropriate for many practical systems: (1) not all incoming requests must be executed sequentially according to some total order and doing so would incur unnecessary (and often prohibitively high) runtime overhead and (2) a sequential execution of all incoming requests might violate the application semantics and might result in deadlocks for some applications. In the past four and half years of my dissertation research, I have focused on designing lightweight BFT solutions for a number of Web services applications (including a shopping cart application, an event stream processing application, Web service business activities (WS-BA), and Web service atomic transactions (WS-AT)) by exploiting application semantics. The main research challenge is to identify how to minimize the use of Byzantine agreement steps and enable concurrent execution of requests that are commutable or unrelated. We have shown that the runtime overhead can be significantly reduced by adopting our lightweight solutions. One limitation for our solutions is that it requires intimate knowledge on the application design and implementation, which may be expensive and error-prone to design such BFT solutions on complex applications. Recognizing this limitation, we investigated the use of Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) to
Application Aware for Byzantine Fault Tolerance
Driven by the need for higher reliability of many distributed systems, various replication-based fault tolerance technologies have been widely studied. A prominent technology is Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT). BFT can help achieve high availability and trustworthiness by ensuring replica consistency despite the presence of hardware failures and malicious faults on a small portion of the replicas. However, most state-of-the-art BFT algorithms are designed for generic stateful applications that require the total ordering of all incoming requests and the sequential execution of such requests. In this dissertation research, we recognize that a straightforward application of existing BFT algorithms is often inappropriate for many practical systems: (1) not all incoming requests must be executed sequentially according to some total order and doing so would incur unnecessary (and often prohibitively high) runtime overhead and (2) a sequential execution of all incoming requests might violate the application semantics and might result in deadlocks for some applications. In the past four and half years of my dissertation research, I have focused on designing lightweight BFT solutions for a number of Web services applications (including a shopping cart application, an event stream processing application, Web service business activities (WS-BA), and Web service atomic transactions (WS-AT)) by exploiting application semantics. The main research challenge is to identify how to minimize the use of Byzantine agreement steps and enable concurrent execution of requests that are commutable or unrelated. We have shown that the runtime overhead can be significantly reduced by adopting our lightweight solutions. One limitation for our solutions is that it requires intimate knowledge on the application design and implementation, which may be expensive and error-prone to design such BFT solutions on complex applications. Recognizing this limitation, we investigated the use of Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) to
Application Aware for Byzantine Fault Tolerance
Driven by the need for higher reliability of many distributed systems, various replication-based fault tolerance technologies have been widely studied. A prominent technology is Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT). BFT can help achieve high availability and trustworthiness by ensuring replica consistency despite the presence of hardware failures and malicious faults on a small portion of the replicas. However, most state-of-the-art BFT algorithms are designed for generic stateful applications that require the total ordering of all incoming requests and the sequential execution of such requests. In this dissertation research, we recognize that a straightforward application of existing BFT algorithms is often inappropriate for many practical systems: (1) not all incoming requests must be executed sequentially according to some total order and doing so would incur unnecessary (and often prohibitively high) runtime overhead and (2) a sequential execution of all incoming requests might violate the application semantics and might result in deadlocks for some applications. In the past four and half years of my dissertation research, I have focused on designing lightweight BFT solutions for a number of Web services applications (including a shopping cart application, an event stream processing application, Web service business activities (WS-BA), and Web service atomic transactions (WS-AT)) by exploiting application semantics. The main research challenge is to identify how to minimize the use of Byzantine agreement steps and enable concurrent execution of requests that are commutable or unrelated. We have shown that the runtime overhead can be significantly reduced by adopting our lightweight solutions. One limitation for our solutions is that it requires intimate knowledge on the application design and implementation, which may be expensive and error-prone to design such BFT solutions on complex applications. Recognizing this limitation, we investigated the use of Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) to
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
Dependability enhancing mechanisms for integrated clinical environments
In this article, we present a set of lightweight mechanisms to enhance the dependability of a safety-critical real-time distributed system referred to as an integrated clinical environment (ICE). In an ICE, medical devices are interconnected and work together with the help of a supervisory computer system to enhance patient safety during clinical operations. Inevitably, there are strong dependability requirements on the ICE. We introduce a set of mechanisms that essentially make the supervisor component a trusted computing base, which can withstand common hardware failures and malicious attacks. The mechanisms rely on the replication of the supervisor component and employ only one input-exchange phase into the critical path of the operation of the ICE. Our analysis shows that the runtime latency overhead is much lower than that of traditional approaches
Concurrent Byzantine Fault Tolerance for Software-Transactional-Memory Based Applications
Typical Byzantine fault tolerance algorithms require the application requests to be executed sequentially, which may severely limit the throughput of the system considering that modern CPUs are equipped with multiple processing cores. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a Byzantine fault tolerance framework for software-transactional-memory based applications that aims to maximize concurrent processing while preserving strong replica consistency. The approach is based on the idea of committing concurrent transactions according to the total order of the requests that triggered the transactions. A comprehensive performance evaluation is carried out to characterize the effectiveness and limitations of this approach
Building on Quicksand
Reliable systems have always been built out of unreliable components. Early
on, the reliable components were small such as mirrored disks or ECC (Error
Correcting Codes) in core memory. These systems were designed such that
failures of these small components were transparent to the application. Later,
the size of the unreliable components grew larger and semantic challenges crept
into the application when failures occurred.
As the granularity of the unreliable component grows, the latency to
communicate with a backup becomes unpalatable. This leads to a more relaxed
model for fault tolerance. The primary system will acknowledge the work request
and its actions without waiting to ensure that the backup is notified of the
work. This improves the responsiveness of the system.
There are two implications of asynchronous state capture: 1) Everything
promised by the primary is probabilistic. There is always a chance that an
untimely failure shortly after the promise results in a backup proceeding
without knowledge of the commitment. Hence, nothing is guaranteed! 2)
Applications must ensure eventual consistency. Since work may be stuck in the
primary after a failure and reappear later, the processing order for work
cannot be guaranteed.
Platform designers are struggling to make this easier for their applications.
Emerging patterns of eventual consistency and probabilistic execution may soon
yield a way for applications to express requirements for a "looser" form of
consistency while providing availability in the face of ever larger failures.
This paper recounts portions of the evolution of these trends, attempts to
show the patterns that span these changes, and talks about future directions as
we continue to "build on quicksand".Comment: CIDR 200
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