CSR-PDOS: BFT: The Time is Now

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

The thesis of this research is simple: Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) techniques and technology trends are nearing an inflection point where significant production deployment of BFT systems can be made viable. This research aims to (1) develop new BFT technologies sufficient to make BFT deployable in a range of production systems and (2) construct significant prototype BFT systems whose costs and performance are comparable to deployed systems that use replication to tolerate a much narrower range of faults. If this work is successful and if technology trends continue, we believe it will become attractive for service providers to trade increasingly inexpensive hardware for the piece of mind provided by BFT replication.