P4CEMaker: automated hardware acceleration of consensus protocols
Paul Breuil, Baptiste Lepers · 2025
P4CEMaker is a novel system designed to semi-automatically accelerate existing RDMA-based consensus protocols through the use of a programmable switch.Central to the design of P4CEMaker is the insight that, despite the diverse algorithmic approaches employed by consensus protocols (fault detection, leader election, …), the protocols fundamentally rely on a shared set of networking operations, such as the scattering and the gathering of values, which can be accelerated by programmable switches.P4CEMaker is implemented in two components. The first is a dynamic analysis tool that automatically detects the aforementioned network operations and gives the developer precise information, in the form of a call graph, to understand where and how they are executed in a consensus protocol’s code. The second is a versatile hardware acceleration library, enabling the execution of these operations in hardware with minimal code modifications.We used P4CEMaker to accelerate four different consensus protocols, achieving up to 2 times performance improvement in around a day of work per protocol.