Paxos Made Transparent

Speaker:        Dr. Heming Cui
                Department of Computer Science
                University of Hong Kong

Title:          "Paxos Made Transparent"

Date:           Monday, 19 October 2015

Time:           4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:          Lecture Theater F (near lifts 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

The fault tolerance and the theoretically proven safety of state machine
replication (SMR) makes it attractive for implementing a principled system
for general programs, especially server programs that demand high
availability. Unfortunately, existing SMR systems unrealistically assume
deterministic code execution when most server programs are
nondeterministic multithreaded programs. Moreover, existing SMR systems
typically provide narrow state machine interfaces, and orchestrating a
sever program into these interfaces can be strenuous and error-prone.

In this talk, I will present CRANE, an SMR system that transparently
replicates general server programs for high availability. It interposes on
the socket and the thread synchronization interfaces to keep replicas in
sync for transparency, requiring no intrusive modifications to shoehorn a
program into a narrow interface. To address nondeterminism, CRANE
leverages deterministic multithreading to keep replicas in sync. CRANE
addresses a difficult network input timing problem via a new technique
called time bubbling. Evaluation on three diverse types of four widely
used server programs (e.g., Apache and ClamAV) show that CRANE is easy to
use, has reasonable overhead, and is robust to machine failures.


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Biography:

Heming Cui is an assistant professor in Computer Science of the University
of Hong Kong (www.cs.hku.hk/~heming). His research interests are in
operating systems, programming languages, and distributed systems, with a
particular focus on building software infrastructures and tools to improve
reliability and security of real world applications. His recent research
has led to several open source projects as well as publication in premier
systems and PL conferences (e.g., SOSP, OSDI, PLDI, and ASPLOS). Before
joining HKU, he obtained his master and bachelor degrees from Computer
Science of Tsinghua University in Beijing, and PhD degree from Computer
Science of Columbia University in New York.