EDC

Efficient Distributed Coordination

(Own Funds)

Project leader: Tobias Distler
Project members: Laura Lawniczak
Start date: 1. January 2012
End date: 31. December 2026
Acronym: EDC
URL: https://www4.cs.fau.de/Research/EDC/

Abstract:

Coordination services such as ZooKeeper are essential building blocks of today's data-center infrastructures as they provide processes of distributed applications with means to exchange messages, to perform leader election, to detect machine or process crashes, or to reliably store configuration data. Providing an anchor of trust for their client applications, coordination services have to meet strong requirements regarding stability and performance. Only this way, it is possible to ensure that a coordination service neither is a single point of failure nor becomes the bottleneck of the entire system.

To address drawbacks of state-of-the-art systems, the EDC project develops approaches that enable coordination services to meet the stability and performance demands. Amongst other things, this includes making these services resilient against both benign and malicious faults, integrating mechanisms for extending the service functionality at runtime in order to minimize communication and synchronization overhead, as well as designing system architectures for effectively and efficiently exploiting the potential of multi-core servers. Although focusing on coordination services, the developed concepts and techniques are expected to also be applicable to other domains, for example, replicated data stores.

Publications:

• Lawniczak L., Distler T.:
  Stream-based State Machine Replication
  In: Proceedings of the 17th European Dependable Computing Conference (EDCC '21) 2021
  DOI: 10.1109/edcc53658.2021.00024
  URL: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.13019
• Eischer M., Distler T.:
  Scalable Byzantine Fault-tolerant State-Machine Replication on Heterogeneous Servers
  In: Computing (2018), p. 1-22
  ISSN: 0010-485X
  DOI: 10.1007/s00607-018-0652-3
  URL: https://www4.cs.fau.de/Publications/2018/eischer_18_computing.pdf
• Schiekofer R., Behl J., Distler T.:
  Agora: A Dependable High-Performance Coordination Service for Multi-Cores
  47th International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN '17) (Denver, USA)
  In: Proceedings of the 47th International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN '17) 2017
• Distler T., Bahn C., Bessani A., Fischer F., Junqueira F.:
  Extensible Distributed Coordination
  EuroSys 2015 (Bordeaux)
  In: Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys '15) 2015
  DOI: 10.1145/2741948.2741954
• Eischer M., Straßner B., Distler T.:
  Low-Latency Geo-Replicated State Machines with Guaranteed Writes
  7th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data, PaPoC 2020 (Heraklion, 27. April 2020 - 27. April 2020)
  In: Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data, PaPoC 2020 2020
  DOI: 10.1145/3380787.3393686
  URL: https://www4.cs.fau.de/Publications/2020/eischer_20_papoc.pdf