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

Performance Engineering of a Lightweight Fault Tolerance Framework

It is well-known that the Paxos algorithm can be used to build provably correct practical fault tolerant systems. In this thesis, a lightweight consensus framework - Paxos-Based Fault Tolerance (PFT) framework and its practical implementation is presented. It also includes how the system tolerates faults under practical conditions where the replicas might not be strictly homogeneous due to the asynchrony of their deployment environment. A comprehensive performance evaluation study is performed on the PFT framework. The approaches that can optimize the fault tolerance mechanisms under various practical scenarios are also discusse

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

Performance Engineering of a Lightweight Fault Tolerance Framework

It is well-known that the Paxos algorithm can be used to build provably correct practical fault tolerant systems. In this thesis, a lightweight consensus framework - Paxos-Based Fault Tolerance (PFT) framework and its practical implementation is presented. It also includes how the system tolerates faults under practical conditions where the replicas might not be strictly homogeneous due to the asynchrony of their deployment environment. A comprehensive performance evaluation study is performed on the PFT framework. The approaches that can optimize the fault tolerance mechanisms under various practical scenarios are also discusse

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

Investigation on the flexural properties and glass transition temperature of kenaf/epoxy composite filled with mesoporous silica for wind turbine applications

This research investigates the strength of kenaf or epoxy composite filled with mesoporous silica and studies the hybrid effects between mesoporous silica orkenaf in epoxy matrix. The volume of kenaf woven mat is maintained constantly at 7.2vol%, whereas proportion of epoxy is varied with inclusion of mesoporous silica and silicon, keeping constant the volume of the composite at 67.5cm3. The proportion of mesoporous silica is altered from 0.5vol%, 1.0vol%, 3.0vol% and 5.0vol%, while silicon is kept constant at 3.0vol%. A total of 11 specimens were produced, each with its distinctive composition and mechanical strengths. Variation of fillers composition affects the mechanical strengths of the composite. SEM analysis shows that epoxy bonds well with silicon, kenaf and mesoporous silica. Some de-bonding among the components is observed within the composite although there is also some tearing of fibres and impregnation of epoxy within fibre, proving that the components have good interaction and do not act individually. Flexural test shows that mesoporous silica improves the flexural strength of the composite, where the highest value is 35.14MPa, obtained at 5.0vol% Mesoporous Silica in Kenaf/Epoxy (SiaK/Ep). It also improves the flexural modulus, where the highest value is 1569.48MPa, obtained at 3.0vol% SiaK/Ep. DMA result reveals that adding mesoporous silica increases the Tg of the composite produced. Highest Tg is obtained at 0.5vol% Mesoporous Silica in Kenaf/Epoxy modofied Silicon (SiaK/Ep-Si) with the value of 87.54°C