Fault-scalable Byzantine fault-tolerant services

  • Authors:
  • Michael Abd-El-Malek;Gregory R. Ganger;Garth R. Goodson;Michael K. Reiter;Jay J. Wylie

  • Affiliations:
  • Carnegie Mellon University;Carnegie Mellon University;Network Appliance, Inc.;Carnegie Mellon University;Carnegie Mellon University

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the twentieth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

A fault-scalable service can be configured to tolerate increasing numbers of faults without significant decreases in performance. The Query/Update (Q/U) protocol is a new tool that enables construction of fault-scalable Byzantine fault-tolerant services. The optimistic quorum-based nature of the Q/U protocol allows it to provide better throughput and fault-scalability than replicated state machines using agreement-based protocols. A prototype service built using the Q/U protocol outperforms the same service built using a popular replicated state machine implementation at all system sizes in experiments that permit an optimistic execution. Moreover, the performance of the Q/U protocol decreases by only 36% as the number of Byzantine faults tolerated increases from one to five, whereas the performance of the replicated state machine decreases by 83%.