Executable Rounds: a Programming Abstraction for Fault-Tolerant Protocols

Cezara Dragoi (1, 2, 3) , Josef Widder (4) , Damien Zufferey (5)

1 DI-ENS - Département d'informatique - ENS Paris
2 PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres
3 ANTIQUE - Analyse Statique par Interprétation Abstraite
4 ICF - Interchain Foundation
5 MPI-SWS - Max Planck Institute for Software Systems

Fault-tolerant distributed systems are notoriously difficult to design and implement. Although programming languages for distributed systems is an active research area, appropriate synchronization primitives for fault-tolerance and group communication remains an important challenge. We present a new programming abstraction, HSync, for implementing benign and Byzantine distributed protocols. HSync is based on communication-closed rounds. Round models offer a simple abstraction for group communication and communication-closed rounds simplify dealing with faults. Protocols are implemented in a modular way in HSync. The language separates the message reception from the process local computation. It extends classic rounds with language constructs that give to the programmer the possibility to implement network and algorithm-specific policies for message reception. We have implemented an execution platform for HSync that runs on top of commodity hardware. We evaluate experimentally its performance, by comparing consensus implementations in HSync with LibPaxos3 and Bft-SMaRt, two consensus libraries tolerant to benign, resp. Byzantine faults.

Domaines: Informatique [cs]; Calcul parallèle, distribué et partagé [cs.DC]

Cezara Dragoi, Josef Widder, Damien Zufferey. Executable Rounds: a Programming Abstraction for Fault-Tolerant Protocols. 2019. ⟨hal-02317446⟩