[NSDI'16] Consensus in a Box: Inexpensive Coordination in Hardware
::star This paper shows how to implement consensus protocols in programmable network hardware to achieve low-latency and high-throughput coordination in distributed systems.
Summary
Arguments: The paper proposes “Consensus in a Box,” a hardware-based solution for achieving consensus in distributed systems. By leveraging programmable network hardware, the authors demonstrate that consensus protocols can be executed more efficiently and with lower latency compared to traditional software-based approaches.
Contributions:
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Hardware Implementation of Consensus Protocols: The authors present a novel approach to implementing consensus protocols directly in network hardware, specifically using programmable switches and network interface cards (NICs). This allows for faster message processing and reduced communication overhead.
- Performance Evaluation: The paper includes a comprehensive performance evaluation, comparing the hardware-based consensus implementation with traditional software-based solutions. The results show significant improvements in throughput and latency, highlighting the advantages of using hardware for consensus tasks.
- Scalability and Fault Tolerance: The authors discuss the scalability of their approach, demonstrating that it can handle a large number of nodes while maintaining fault tolerance. They also explore the trade-offs involved in using hardware for consensus, such as the complexity of programming and potential limitations in flexibility.
Key Words: Consensus, Paxos, Distributed Systems, Hardware Acceleration, Programmable Networks, FPGA, NIC, Latency, Throughput, Fault Tolerance.
Detailed Notes
Knowledges
Building upon these advances, the following question arises: could agreement be made a property of the network rather than implementing it at the application level? Given the current trade off between complexity of operations and the achievable throughput of middleboxes, the third goal of this work is to explore how to push down agreement protocols into the network in an efficient manner.
TCP gives very strong guarantees to the application level, but is very conservative about the guarantees provided by the underlying network. Unlike the Internet, datacenter networks have well-defined topologies, capacities, and set of network devices. These properties, combined with knowledge about the application, allow us to tailor the TCP protocol and reduce the latency even further without giving up any of the guarantees provided by TCP.