Scalable BFT for multi-cores: actor-based decomposition and consensus-oriented parallelization
Johannes Behl, Tobias Distler, Rüdiger Kapitza · 2014
To pave the way for Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) sys-tems that can exploit the potential of modern multi-core platforms, we present a new parallelization scheme en-abling BFT systems to scale with the number of avail-able cores and to provide the performance required by critical central services. The main idea is to orga-nize parallelism around complete instances of the un-derlying multi-phase BFT agreement protocols, and not around single tasks (e.g., authenticating messages), as re-alized in state-of-the-art systems. We implemented this consensus-oriented parallelization scheme on basis of a BFT prototype that permits flexibly configured paral-lelism by relying on an actor decomposition. In an early evaluation conducted on machines with twelve cores, the consensus-oriented parallelization achieved over 200% higher throughput than a traditional approach while leav-ing the potential to utilize even more cores and exhibiting a significantly greater efficiency in a single-core setup. 1