Linearizable Replicated State Machines with Lattice Agreement

TL;DR

This paper presents a new lattice agreement algorithm with improved asynchronous round complexity, and demonstrates its practical application in building more efficient linearizable replicated state machines compared to traditional consensus protocols.

Contribution

The paper introduces an improved lattice agreement protocol with faster asynchronous rounds and applies it to build a more efficient linearizable RSM.

Findings

The new protocol achieves $O( ext{log} f)$ asynchronous rounds.

Implementation shows better performance than Paxos-based RSM.

Demonstrates practical benefits of lattice agreement in RSMs.

Abstract

This paper studies the lattice agreement problem in asynchronous systems and explores its application to building linearizable replicated state machines (RSM). First, we propose an algorithm to solve the lattice agreement problem in $O(\log f)$ asynchronous rounds, where $f$ is the number of crash failures that the system can tolerate. This is an exponential improvement over the previous best upper bound. Second, Faleiro et al have shown in [Faleiro et al. PODC, 2012] that combination of conflict-free data types and lattice agreement protocols can be applied to implement linearizable RSM. They give a Paxos style lattice agreement protocol, which can be adapted to implement linearizable RSM and guarantee that a command can be learned in at most $O(n)$ message delays, where $n$ is the number of proposers. Later on, Xiong et al in [Xiong et al. DISC, 2018] give a lattice agreement protocol which improves the $O(n)$ guarantee to be $O(f)$. However, neither protocols is practical for building a linearizable RSM. Thus, in the second part of the paper, we first give an improved protocol based on the one proposed by Xiong et al. Then, we implement a simple linearizable RSM using the our improved protocol and compare our implementation with an open source Java implementation of Paxos. Results show that better performance can be obtained by using lattice agreement based protocols to implement a linearizable RSM compared to traditional consensus based protocols.