377 research outputs found
DKVF: A Framework for Rapid Prototyping and Evaluating Distributed Key-value Stores
We present our framework DKVF that enables one to quickly prototype and
evaluate new protocols for key-value stores and compare them with existing
protocols based on selected benchmarks. Due to limitations of CAP theorem, new
protocols must be developed that achieve the desired trade-off between
consistency and availability for the given application at hand. Hence, both
academic and industrial communities focus on developing new protocols that
identify a different (and hopefully better in one or more aspect) point on this
trade-off curve. While these protocols are often based on a simple intuition,
evaluating them to ensure that they indeed provide increased availability,
consistency, or performance is a tedious task. Our framework, DKVF, enables one
to quickly prototype a new protocol as well as identify how it performs
compared to existing protocols for pre-specified benchmarks. Our framework
relies on YCSB (Yahoo! Cloud Servicing Benchmark) for benchmarking. We
demonstrate DKVF by implementing four existing protocols --eventual
consistency, COPS, GentleRain and CausalSpartan-- with it. We compare the
performance of these protocols against different loading conditions. We find
that the performance is similar to our implementation of these protocols from
scratch. And, the comparison of these protocols is consistent with what has
been reported in the literature. Moreover, implementation of these protocols
was much more natural as we only needed to translate the pseudocode into Java
(and add the necessary error handling). Hence, it was possible to achieve this
in just 1-2 days per protocol. Finally, our framework is extensible. It is
possible to replace individual components in the framework (e.g., the storage
component)
Preserving Stabilization while Practically Bounding State Space
Stabilization is a key dependability property for dealing with unanticipated
transient faults, as it guarantees that even in the presence of such faults,
the system will recover to states where it satisfies its specification. One of
the desirable attributes of stabilization is the use of bounded space for each
variable. In this paper, we present an algorithm that transforms a stabilizing
program that uses variables with unbounded domain into a stabilizing program
that uses bounded variables and (practically bounded) physical time. While
non-stabilizing programs (that do not handle transient faults) can deal with
unbounded variables by assigning large enough but bounded space, stabilizing
programs that need to deal with arbitrary transient faults cannot do the same
since a transient fault may corrupt the variable to its maximum value. We show
that our transformation algorithm is applicable to several problems including
logical clocks, vector clocks, mutual exclusion, leader election, diffusing
computations, Paxos based consensus, and so on. Moreover, our approach can also
be used to bound counters used in an earlier work by Katz and Perry for adding
stabilization to a non-stabilizing program. By combining our algorithm with
that earlier work by Katz and Perry, it would be possible to provide
stabilization for a rich class of problems, by assigning large enough but
bounded space for variables.Comment: Moved some content from the Appendix to the main paper, added some
details to the transformation algorithm and to its descriptio
Auditable Restoration of Distributed Programs
We focus on a protocol for auditable restoration of distributed systems. The
need for such protocol arises due to conflicting requirements (e.g., access to
the system should be restricted but emergency access should be provided). One
can design such systems with a tamper detection approach (based on the
intuition of "break the glass door"). However, in a distributed system, such
tampering, which are denoted as auditable events, is visible only for a single
node. This is unacceptable since the actions they take in these situations can
be different than those in the normal mode. Moreover, eventually, the auditable
event needs to be cleared so that system resumes the normal operation.
With this motivation, in this paper, we present a protocol for auditable
restoration, where any process can potentially identify an auditable event.
Whenever a new auditable event occurs, the system must reach an "auditable
state" where every process is aware of the auditable event. Only after the
system reaches an auditable state, it can begin the operation of restoration.
Although any process can observe an auditable event, we require that only
"authorized" processes can begin the task of restoration. Moreover, these
processes can begin the restoration only when the system is in an auditable
state. Our protocol is self-stabilizing and has bounded state space. It can
effectively handle the case where faults or auditable events occur during the
restoration protocol. Moreover, it can be used to provide auditable restoration
to other distributed protocol.Comment: 10 page
Automated Synthesis of Distributed Self-Stabilizing Protocols
In this paper, we introduce an SMT-based method that automatically
synthesizes a distributed self-stabilizing protocol from a given high-level
specification and network topology. Unlike existing approaches, where synthesis
algorithms require the explicit description of the set of legitimate states,
our technique only needs the temporal behavior of the protocol. We extend our
approach to synthesize ideal-stabilizing protocols, where every state is
legitimate. We also extend our technique to synthesize monotonic-stabilizing
protocols, where during recovery, each process can execute an most once one
action. Our proposed methods are fully implemented and we report successful
synthesis of well-known protocols such as Dijkstra's token ring, a
self-stabilizing version of Raymond's mutual exclusion algorithm,
ideal-stabilizing leader election and local mutual exclusion, as well as
monotonic-stabilizing maximal independent set and distributed Grundy coloring
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