CSR:NeTS:Small:GigaPaxos: System Support for Group-Scalable, Reconfigurable Replica Coordination

University Of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst MA

Investigators

Abstract

This project is developing a cloud computing technology called GigaPaxos that enables Internet services to be dynamically moved close to their users. For example, imagine you and your friend jointly editing a shared document or playing your favorite online game at a WiFi-enabled cafe. Wouldn't it be convenient if the document or game server magically moved to a "nano-data center" located right at the WiFi access point ensuring local-area-network-like fast performance and resilience to outages in Internet connectivity or data centers? GigaPaxos promises to realize this vision to bring these low-latency and fault-tolerance benefits to any mobile cloud service with minimal programming effort. A key intellectual merit of this project lies in dramatically increasing "group scalability" or the ability to maintain a very large number of independent consensus instances, one each for each lightweight fault-tolerant principal as small as a distributed counter, a user's calendar, a single record in a key-value store, etc. GigaPaxos allows each consensus instance to consume no more than a few hundred bytes; enables developers to programmatically sprinkle and reconfigure lightweight replicas of services in accordance with resource management, performance, or availability objectives; enables flexible consistency semantics; enables byzantine fault-tolerance support to accommodate untrusted machines; and facilitates a number of realistic end-to-end application case studies to validate ease-of-use and user-perceived quality of experience. The broader impacts of this project include new course curriculum on distributed systems targeting senior undergraduates and Masters students; a computer science diversity and enrollment effort targeting University of Massachusetts Amherst undergraduates as well as high school students; an aggressive dissemination plan involving fostering a vibrant open-source community to help sustain GigaPaxos beyond the project's duration; and quantitative user- and developer-centric usability case studies that will help improve GigaPaxos and potentially simplify distributed systems development in the long term. The project researchers will host the open-source code repository at https://github.com/MobilityFirst/gigapaxos and documentation and research publications at https://gigapaxos.io for the duration of the project and indefinitely beyond that contingent on community interest.