Abstract

We argue for a simple change to Byzantine Fault Tolerant state machine replication libraries in order to provide high throughput. Traditional state machine replication based Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) techniques provide high availability and security but fail to provide high throughput. This limitation stems from the fundamental assumption of generalized state machine replication techniques that all replicas execute requests sequentially in the same total order to ensure consistency across replicas. We propose a high throughput Byzantine fault tolerant architecture that uses application-specific information to identify and concurrently execute independent requests. Our architecture thus provides a general way to exploit application parallelism in order to provide high throughput without compromising correctness. Although this approach is extremely simple, it yields dramatic practical benefits. When sufficient application concurrency and hardware resources exist, CBASE, our system prototype, provides orders of magnitude improvements in throughput over BASE, a traditional BFT architecture. CBASE-FS, a Byzantine fault tolerant file system that uses CBASE, achieves twice the throughput of BASE-FS for the IOZone micro-benchmarks even in a configuration with modest available hardware parallelism. 1

Citations