Building State Machine Replication Using Practical Network Synchrony

Abstract: Distributed systems, such as state machine replication, are critical infrastructures for modern applications. Practical distributed protocols make minimum assumptions about the underlying network: They typically assume a partially synchronous or fully asynchronous network model. In this work, we argue that modern data center systems can be designed to provide strong synchrony properties in the common case, where servers move in synchronous lock-step rounds. We prove this hypothesis by engineering a practical design that uses a combination of kernel-bypass network, multithreaded architecture, and loosened round length, achieving a tight round bound under 2us. Leveraging our engineered networks with strong synchrony, we co-design a new replication protocol, Chora. Chora exploits the network synchrony property to efficiently pipeline multiple replication instances, while allowing all replicas to propose in parallel without extra coordination. Through experiments, we show that Chora achieves 255% and 109% improvement in throughput over state-of-the-art single-leader and multi-leader protocols, respectively.