Resource-Efficient State-Machine Replication with Multithreading and Vertical Scaling

Abstract

State-machine replication (SMR) enables transparent and delayless masking of node faults. It can tolerate crash faults and malicious misbehavior, but usually comes with high resource costs, not only by requiring multiple active replicas, but also by providing the replicas with enough resources for the expected peak load. This paper presents a vertical resource-scaling solution for SMR systems in virtualized environments, which can dynamically adapt the number of available cores to current load. In similar approaches, benefits of CPU core scaling are usually small due to the inherent sequential execution of SMR systems in order to achieve determinism. In our approach, we utilize sophisticated deterministic multithreading to avoid this bottleneck and experimentally demonstrate that core scaling then allows SMR systems to effectively tailor resources to service load, dramatically reducing service provider costs.