Zoo-Spinner: A Network-Accelerated Consensus Protocol
Elias Stalder · Repository for Publications and Research Data (ETH Zurich) · 2020
In recent years, various systems have been proposed to reduce latency and host utilization by offloading network-related tasks to the NIC.Many of these systems, however, are designed for special purposes or are limited in performance or flexibility.PsPIN tries to overcome these shortcomings with its flexible programming model (sPIN) while providing line-rate processing at 400 Gbit/s.To improve reliability and increase scalability, consensus protocols are used to consistently replicate data among multiple servers.Consensus, however, is an expensive operation as it requires a lot of coordination.To alleviate this bottleneck in data centers for distributed applications, we offload consensus to the NIC by implementing ZAB, the atomic broadcast protocol of Zookeeper, and investigate its performance on PsPIN with cycle-accurate simulations for multiple use cases.Our work demonstrates that the sPIN programming model is suitable for implementing complex data center related protocols and that PsPIN, a PULP-based implementation of sPIN, is able to provide 100 % more requests per second than state-of-the-art ZAB implementations.