The goal of this project is to develop a new set of optimized consensus protocols that leverage recent advances in network programmability and hardware design. We expect that these protocols will dramatically improve the performance of storage and replication systems that are the fundamental infrastructure for distributed and cloud computing services.
Our current efforts are focused on two fronts: (i) implementing the widely deployed Paxos consensus protocol in network forwarding devices, and (ii) designning an alternative, optimistic protocol which can be implemented without changes to the OpenFlow API, but relies on assumptions about how the network orders messages.
The source code and demo of a P4 based implementation of Paxos is released under an LGPL license, and is available on GitHub.
Try the demo.