Scalable BFT for Multi-Cores: Actor-Based Decomposition and Consensus-Oriented Parallelization

To pave the way for Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) systems that can exploit the potential of modern multi-core platforms, we present a new parallelization scheme enabling BFT systems to scale with the number of available cores and to provide the performance required by critical central services. The main idea is to organize parallelism around complete instances of the underlying multi-phase BFT agreement protocols, and not around single tasks (e.g., authenticating messages), as realized in state-of-the-art systems. We implemented this consensus-oriented parallelization scheme on basis of a BFT prototype that permits flexibly configured parallelism by relying on an actor decomposition. In an early evaluation conducted on machines with twelve cores, the consensus-oriented parallelization achieved over 200% higher throughput than a traditional approach while leaving the potential to utilize even more cores and exhibiting a significantly greater efficiency in a single-core setup.