Projects details

  • Byzantium - Byzantium: Efficient Byzantine fault-tolerant database replication
  • Jan 2008 - Jun 2011
  • The goal of this project is to develop an efficient middleware system to support byzantine fault-tolerant database replication. Relational database systems are employed for supporting a wide range
    of uses, from simple applications used by members of a small
    organization to complex applications used by thousands of users. For
    example, most web applications built upon the popular three-tier
    model rely on a database system to store all manipulated data.

    In many applications, performance and availability are crucial,
    which implies that the underlying database engine must also offer
    good performance and high availability.

    Replication is a technique that can be used to improve availability
    by maintaining multiple data replicas and relying on the replicas of
    the surviving nodes to continue operation in the presence of
    failures. Replication algorithms can be divided broadly into eager
    and lazy algorithms. Lazy replication algorithms [SS05]
    asynchronously propagate replica updates to other replicas after the
    updating transaction commits. This approach allows good performance
    by minimizing the coordination overhead among replicas when
    transactions are executed. However, in the presence of concurrent
    transactions, this approach may lead to temporary replica staleness,
    and even replica divergence (depending on the protocol used). In
    this case, maintaining consistency is usually left to the the
    application, requiring application-specific solutions. Thus, when
    consistency is important, as it is the case in many database-based
    applications, it is simpler to rely on eager replication schemes.

    Another important choice replication algorithms make are the
    assumptions about the behavior of faulty replicas. Most earlier
    research has focused on techniques that tolerate benign faults:
    these algorithms assume components fail by stopping or by omitting
    some steps and may not provide correct service if a faulty component
    violates this assumption. This assumption can be problematic as
    malicious attacks, operator mistakes, and software errors can cause
    faulty nodes to exhibit arbitrary behavior. Techniques that tolerate
    Byzantine faults [LSP82] address this problem since they make no
    assumptions about the behavior of faulty components.

    The central goal of this project is to build a replicated database
    system that tolerates Byzantine faults. The main challenge resides
    in the fact that Byzantine fault tolerance replication introduces a
    non-negligible performance overhead. This fact, combined with the
    necessity of the use of eager replication, has led to a low adoption
    of Byzantine fault tolerance in database replication. This project
    aims at developing novel techniques for improving the performance of
    Byzantine fault tolerant replicated databases.

    The first technique this project will explore is to relax the
    isolation level [BBG+95] for transaction execution. This approach
    has the potential to improve scalability by allowing a higher degree
    of concurrency among transactions, as it is shown in recent papers
    [LKPMJP05, EZP05]. Moreover, it does not pose any major problem for
    applications that require strict serializability, as it has already
    been shown how to transform an application program so that its
    execution under snapshot isolation is equivalent to strict
    serializability [FLO+05]. In this project we will design novel
    database replication algorithms that combine eager replication,
    Byzantine fault tolerance, and provide snapshot-isolation semantics.

    The second mechanism that we intend to integrate in our solution is
    support for speculative execution [NCF05] in the client. In such a
    scheme, the client program continues its execution before the final
    result of an operation is established, based on a tentative result.
    This approach will allow to partially mask delay times required for
    coordination in Byzantine eager replication algorithms, leading to
    better perceived performance from clients. This speculative
    execution will tend to use computing resources that would be
    otherwise wasted, as it is executed in the client when the client is
    waiting for the operation result, thus imposing no (or minimal)
    overhead in the clients. Additionally, as this approach reduces the
    importance of providing an immediate reply to clients, it also opens
    the opportunity to improve the performance of Byzantine replication
    by optimizing the replication protocol . e.g., the distinct primary
    replica, usually responsible for ordering the requests, will now be
    able to group more operations into a single request and execute them
    in batches.

    Our solution will be built as a middleware layer. We intend to
    reduce to the minimum the dependencies on the underlying database
    engine, thus improving the portability of our solution and making it
    easily usable with different database engines.

  • PN
  • CITI - FCT/UNL - Centro de Informática e Tecnologias de Informação, FCT/UNL
  • FCT-MCTES - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (MEC)
  • 130
  • 94
  • 1 Jan 2008
  • 30 Jun 2011
  • Vítor Duarte [Researcher], João Lourenço [Researcher], Sérgio Duarte [Researcher], Nuno Preguiça [Coordinator], Ricardo Dias [Researcher]
  • INESC-ID