DSG Seminar Series • Basil: Scaling BFT with ACID transactions

Speaker: Natacha Crooks, University of California - Berkeley

(Talk virtually over zoom; note: talk will be recorded)

Abstract: 

In this talk, I will discuss alternative ways to scale the abstraction of a Byzantine fault-tolerant shared log, which have regained popularity with the recent growth of decentralized trust. Specifically, I will present Basil. Basil leverages ACID transactions to scalably implement this abstraction . Unlike traditional BFT approaches, Basil executes non-conflicting operations in parallel and commits transactions in a single round-trip during fault-free executions. Basil improves throughput over traditional BFT systems by four to five times, and is only four times slower than TAPIR, a non-Byzantine replicated system. Basil's novel recovery mechanism further minimizes the impact of failures: with 30% Byzantine clients, throughput drops by less than 25% in the worst-case.

Bio: Natacha Crooks is an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley. She works at the intersection of distributed systems and databases with a recent focus on privacy and integrity in transactional datastores. She obtained her PhD from UT Austin in 2019 for which she obtained the Dennis Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Talk video