Optimistic Parallel State-Machine Replication

Abstract: 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 underuses 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.