Scaling Leader-Based Agreement Protocols for State Machine Replication

State machine replication is a technique used to guarantee the availability of a system even in the presence of faults. Agreement protocols are often used to implement state machine replication. However, the throughput of many agreement protocols, such as Paxos, does not scale with the number of machines available to the system. Systems whose throughput does scale often provide weaker consistency guarantees than state machine replication’s linearizability. These weaker guarantees, such as eventual consistency, make the job of the application programmer much more difficult. Kapritsos and Junqueira previously proposed a protocol which uses an agreement protocol as a primitive and does scale. In this thesis, I describe my novel implementation of this protocol as well as the optimizations that were necessary to achieve scalability. The results of my experiments with this system show modest but promising evidence that the throughput of this system can, indeed, scale linearly with the number of machines.