CSR: Small: Replication in the Cloud Era

现代生活依赖于计算机，但人们期望的全天候可用性很难实现。计算机远不是万无一失的，而且经常死机。为了防止此类故障扰乱基本服务，研究界在过去40年里一直在开发容错技术，使服务在出现故障时仍能不间断地继续提供。这些技术为我们提供了良好的服务，也是我们今天享受到无缝服务的主要原因。然而，尽管它们具有所有优点，但我们的容错技术存在一个根本的设计缺陷。它们是为独立服务设计的：在一台机器上执行的服务，不需要与其他服务交互。然而，在当今的计算中，这种独立的服务正变得越来越不常见，因为大型系统由多个交互组件组成。在这个美好的新世界里，我们现有的容错技术已经不再起作用。本研究旨在提高此类交互服务的容错性，主要有三个目标。(1)建立框架，简化服务之间的交互。(2)恢复正确性，通过重新思考我们如何使用先进的技术，如投机性执行。(3)通过研究有效实现这种交互的方法，专注于优化性能。实现这三个目标将使容错在今天的大规模系统中得到实际实现，这是确保我们未来能够继续享受无缝服务的关键。现在我们的系统太大了，不能作为单一的服务来实现，容错技术必须适应，以避免过时。这个项目旨在引导未来关于容错的学术努力从独立的服务转向更实用的环境。通过这样做，它旨在加强学术界和产业界之间的联系，让他们努力实现这个新的共同目标：在云时代复制。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Modern life depends on computers, but 24/7 availability that people expect is hard to achieve. Computers are far from infallible and frequently crash. To prevent such failures from disrupting essential services, the research community has spent the last 40 years developing fault-tolerance techniques, which allow services to continue uninterrupted despite failures. These techniques have served us well and are the main reason behind the seamless services we enjoy today. For all their merits, however, our fault-tolerance techniques have a fundamental design flaw. They were designed for standalone services: services which execute on a single machine and do not need to interact with other services. However, such standalone services are becoming increasingly uncommon in today's computing, where large systems consist of multiple interacting components. In this brave new world, our existing fault-tolerance techniques no longer work.This research aims to improve fault-tolerance for such interacting services and has three main goals. (1) Establish a framework to simplify the interactions between services. (2) Restore correctness, by rethinking how we employ advanced techniques, like speculative execution. (3) Focus on optimizing performance by investigating ways to implement such interactions efficiently. Achieving these three goals will enable practical implementations of fault-tolerance in today's large-scale systems, which is the key to ensuring that we can continue to enjoy seamless services in the future.Now that our systems are too large to be implemented as a single service, fault-tolerant techniques must adapt to avoid becoming obsolete. This project aims to steer future academic efforts on fault tolerance away from standalone services and towards a more practical setting. In doing so, it aims to strengthen the ties between academia and industry by having them strive towards this new, common goal: replication in the cloud era.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.