Towards Transparent Hardening of Distributed Systems

Research output: Contribution to conferencesPaperContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

In distributed systems, errors such as data corruption or arbitrary changes to the flow of programs might cause processes to propagate incorrect state across the system. To prevent error propagation in such systems, an efficient and effective technique is to harden processes against Arbitrary State Corruption (ASC) faults through local detection, without replication. For distributed systems designed from scratch, dealing with state corruption can be made fully transparent, but requires that developers follow a few concrete design patterns. In this paper, we discuss the problem of hardening existing code bases of distributed systems transparently. Existing systems have not been designed with ASC hardening in mind, so they do not necessarily follow required design patterns. For such systems, we focus here on both performance and number of changes to the existing code base. Using memcached as an example, we identify and discuss three areas of improvement: reducing the memory overhead, improving access to state variables, and supporting multi-threading. Our initial evaluation of memcached shows that our ASC-hardened version obtains a throughput that is roughly 76% of the throughput of stock memcached with 128-byte and 1k-byte messages.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Number of pages6
Publication statusPublished - 2013
Peer-reviewedYes

Conference

Title9th Workshop on Hot Topics in Dependable Systems (HotDep '13), ACM, 2013
Abbreviated titleHotDep '13
Conference number
Duration3 November 2013
Degree of recognitionInternational event
Location
CityFirmington Pennsylvania
CountryUnited States of America

Keywords

Research priority areas of TU Dresden

DFG Classification of Subject Areas according to Review Boards

Keywords

  • data corruption, fault-tolerance, distributed systems, Fault-tolerance, data corruption