Rising Star Talk 1: Wednesday (August 24, 2022) 2:00 pm - 2:30 pm

Abstract:

Traditionally, distributed systems are designed with very little assumption about the underlying network: The network is assumed to only provide best-effort guarantees and is fully asynchronous. Application-level protocols, such as Paxos and two phase locking/commit, are then responsible for ensuring the correctness and liveness of the system. Unfortunately, weak guarantees of the network often result in distributed protocols with complex message exchanges, limiting the overall performance of the system. In this talk, I will introduce a new approach to designing distributed systems by strengthening the network and co-designing it with distributed protocols. Specifically, our work has leveraged new-generation programmable devices to build novel and highly efficient network-level primitives that offer strong guarantees. We then leverage these primitives to enable more efficient protocol and system designs. I will describe several systems we built that demonstrate the benefit of this approach. The first two, Network-Ordered Paxos and Eris, virtually eliminate the coordination overhead in state machine replication and fault-tolerant distributed transactions, by relying on network sequencing primitives to consistently order user requests. The third system, Hydra, overcomes the limitations of a centralized network sequencer in previous solutions, by deploying a distributed set of sequencers without sacrificing the ordering guarantees. I will end the talk with our recent work on accelerating BFT protocols using this co-design approach.