Parisa Jalili Marandi

Merlin: A Language for Provisioning Network Resources

This paper presents Merlin, a new framework for managing resources in software-defined networks. With Merlin, administrators express high-level policies using programs in a declarative language. The language includes logical predicates to identify sets of packets, regular expressions to encode forwarding paths, and arithmetic formulas to specify bandwidth constraints. The Merlin compiler maps these policies into a constraint problem that determines bandwidth allocations using parameterizable heuristics. It then generates code that can be executed on the network elements to enforce the policies. To allow network tenants to dynamically adapt policies to their needs, Merlin provides mechanisms for delegating control of sub-policies and for verifying that modifications made to sub-policies do not violate global constraints. Experiments demonstrate the expressiveness and effectiveness of Merlin on real-world topologies and applications. Overall, Merlin simplifies network administration by providing high-level abstractions for specifying network policies that provision network resources.

Ring Paxos: A high-throughput atomic broadcast protocol

Atomic broadcast is an important communication primitive often used to implement state-machine replication. Despite the large number of atomic broadcast algorithms proposed in the literature, few papers have discussed how to turn these algorithms into efficient executable protocols. Our main contribution, Ring Paxos, is a protocol derived from Paxos. Ring Paxos inherits the reliability of Paxos and can be implemented very efficiently. We report a detailed performance analysis of Ring Paxos and compare it to other atomic broadcast protocols.

Multi-Ring Paxos

This paper addresses the scalability of group communication protocols. Scalability has become an issue of prime importance as data centers become commonplace. By scalability we mean the ability to increase the throughput of a group communication protocol, measured in number of requests ordered per time unit, by adding resources (i.e., nodes). We claim that existing group communication protocols do not scale in this respect and introduce Multi-Ring Paxos, a protocol that orchestrates multiple instances of Ring Paxos in order to scale to a large number of nodes. In addition to presenting Multi-Ring Paxos, we describe a prototype of the system we have implemented and a detailed evaluation of its performance.

High performance state-machine replication

State-machine replication is a well-established approach to fault tolerance. The idea is to replicate a service on multiple servers so that it remains available despite the failure of one or more servers. From a performance perspective, state-machine replication has two limitations. First, it introduces some overhead in service response time, due to the requirement to totally order commands. Second, service throughput cannot be augmented by adding replicas to the system. We address the two issues in this paper. We use speculative execution to reduce the response time and state partitioning to increase the throughput of state-machine replication. We illustrate these techniques with a highly available parallel B-tree service.

Optimistic Parallel State-Machine Replication

State-machine replication, a fundamental approach to fault tolerance, requires replicas to execute commands deterministically, which usually results in sequential execution of commands. Sequential execution limits performance and under-uses servers, which are increasingly parallel (i.e., multicore). To narrow the gap between state-machine replication requirements and the characteristics of modern servers, researchers have recently come up with alternative execution models. This paper surveys existing approaches to parallel state-machine replication and proposes a novel optimistic protocol that inherits the scalable features of previous techniques. Using a replicated B+-tree service, we demonstrate in the paper that our protocol outperforms the most efficient techniques by a factor of 2.4 times.

Checkpointing in Parallel State-Machine Replication

State-machine replication is a popular approach to building fault-tolerant systems, which relies on the sequential execution of commands to guarantee strong consistency. Sequential execution, however, threatens performance. Recently, several proposals have suggested parallelizing the execution model of the replicas to enhance state-machine replication’s performance. Despite their success in accomplishing high performance, the implications of these models on checkpointing and recovery is mostly left unaddressed. In this paper, we focus on the checkpointing problem in the context of Parallel State-Machine Replication. We propose two novel algorithms and assess them through simulation and a real implementation.

The Performance of Paxos in the Cloud

This experience report presents the results of an extensive performance evaluation conducted using four open-source implementations of Paxos deployed in Amazons EC2. Paxos is a fundamental algorithm for building fault-tolerant services, at the core of state-machine replication. Implementations of Paxos are currently used in many prototypes and production systems in both academia and industry. Although all protocols surveyed in the paper implement Paxos, they are optimized in a number of different ways, resulting in very different behavior, as we show in the paper. We have considered a variety of configurations and failure-free and faulty executions. In addition to reporting our findings, we propose and assess additional optimizations to existing implementations.

Ring Paxos: High-Throughput Atomic Broadcast

Atomic broadcast is an important communication primitive often used to implement state-machine replication. Despite the large number of atomic broadcast algorithms proposed in the literature, few papers have discussed how to turn these algorithms into efficient executable protocols. This paper focuses on a class of atomic broadcast algorithms based on Paxos, with its corresponding desirable properties: safety under asynchrony assumptions, liveness under weak synchrony assumptions, and resiliency-optimality. The paper presents two protocols, M-Ring Paxos and U-Ring Paxos, derived from Paxos. The protocols inherit the properties of Paxos and can be implemented very efficiently. We report a detailed performance analysis of M-Ring Paxos and U-Ring Paxos and compare them to other atomic broadcast protocols.

Building global and scalable systems with atomic multicast

The rise of worldwide Internet-scale services demands large distributed systems. Indeed, when handling several millions of users, it is common to operate thousands of servers spread across the globe. Here, replication plays a central role, as it contributes to improve the user experience by hiding failures and by providing acceptable latency. In this work, we claim that atomic multicast, with strong and well-defined properties, is the appropriate abstraction to efficiently design and implement globally scalable distributed systems. We substantiate our claim with the design of two modern online services atop atomic multicast, a strongly consistent key-value store and a distributed log.

Chasing the Tail of Atomic Broadcast Protocols

Many applications today rely on multiple services, whose results are combined to form the applications response. In such contexts, the most unreliable service and the slowest service determine the applications reliability and response time, respectively. State-machine replication and atomic broadcast are fundamental abstractions to build highly available services. In this paper, we consider the latency variability of atomic broadcast protocols. This is important because atomic broadcast has a direct impact on the response time of services. We study four high performance atomic broadcast protocols representative of different classes of protocol design and characterize their latency tail distribution under different workloads. Next, we assess how key design features of each protocol can possibly be related to the observed latency tail distributions. Our observations hint at request batching as a simple yet effective way to shorten the latency tails of some of the studied protocols, an improvement within the reach of application implementers. Indeed, our observation is not only verified experimentally, it allows us to assess which of the protocols key design principles favor the construction of latency predictable protocols.