CSR: Small: Co-Designing Distributed Coordination Systems and the Datacenter Network

数据中心应用程序必须保持连续可用，并保持数据一致，尽管个别服务器可能会出现故障。这是分布式系统设计的基本挑战之一：协调对分布式服务的访问。今天的系统使用复杂的分布式算法（如Paxos和两阶段提交）来解决这些问题，但这些算法通常被认为对于实际使用来说过于昂贵。这是因为这些算法是独立于底层网络设计的，并且必须对底层网络做出最坏情况的假设。本项目将探索一种为数据中心设计分布式系统的新方法：与网络层共同设计分布式协议。这包括设计新的网络级原语，以使数据中心网络能够提供更强的语义，例如，一种近似同步的执行模式。这些原语将被用于设计高性能的分布式系统，包括状态机复制协议和事务存储系统，提高分布式系统的容错能力，增强关键数据中心基础设施的健壮性。它还将降低强一致性事务存储的成本，使应用程序开发人员更容易推理对共享数据的并发访问，从而鼓励创新。

Datacenter applications must remain continuously available and keep data consistent despite the fact that individual servers may fail. This is one of the fundamental challenges of distributed systems design: coordinating accesses to distributed services. Today's systems solve these problems with sophisticated distributed algorithms like Paxos and two-phase commit, yet these are frequently considered too expensive for practical use. This is because these algorithms are designed independently from -- and must make worst-case assumptions about -- the underlying network.This project will explore a new approach to designing distributed systems for the datacenter: co-designing distributed protocols with the network layer. This includes designing new network-level primitives to enable datacenter networks to provide stronger semantics, e.g., an approximately synchronous mode of execution. Then these primitives will be used to design high-performance distributed systems, including state machine replication protocols and transactional storage systems.This work will improve the ability of distributed systems to provide fault tolerance with high performance, increasing the robustness of critical datacenter infrastructure. It will also reduce the cost of strongly-consistent transactional storage, making it easier for application developers to reason about concurrent accesses to shared data, and thereby encourage innovation.