Programming at the edge of synchrony

Abstract

Synchronization primitives for fault-tolerant distributed systems that ensure an effective and efficient cooperation among processes are an important challenge in the programming languages community. We present a new programming abstraction, ReSync, for implementing benign and Byzantine fault-tolerant protocols. ReSync has a new round structure that offers a simple abstraction for group communication, like it is customary in synchronous systems, but also allows messages to be received one by one, like in the asynchronous systems. This extension allows implementing network and algorithm-specific policies for the message reception, which is not possible in classic round models. The execution of ReSync programs is based on a new generic round switch protocol that generalizes the famous theoretical result about consensus in the presence of partial synchrony by of Dwork, Lynch, and Stockmeyer. We evaluate experimentally the performance of ReSync’s execution platform, by comparing consensus implementations in ReSync with LibPaxos3, etcd, and Bft-SMaRt, three consensus libraries tolerant to benign, resp. byzantine faults.