Mikhail
Kazhamiaka,
Master’s
candidate
David
R.
Cheriton
School
of
Computer
Science
Sift is a new consensus protocol for replicating state machines. It disaggregates CPU and memory consumption by creating a novel system architecture enabled by one-sided RDMA operations.
We show that this system architecture allows us to develop a consensus protocol design which centralizes the replication logic. This simplifies the design of the protocol by preventing complex interactions between the participants of the consensus group. Our dissaggregated design also enables Sift to reduce deployment costs by sharing backup computational nodes across consensus groups deployed within the same cloud environment. We can further reduce the required storage resources by integrating erasure codes without making significant changes to our protocol.
Our evaluation results show that in a cloud environment with 100 groups where each group can support up to 2 simultaneous failures, Sift can reduce the cost by 56% compared to an RDMA-based Raft deployment.