Scalable Byzantine Fault Tolerance on Heterogeneous Servers

Abstract

When provided with more powerful or extra hardware, state-of-the-art Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) agreement protocols are unable to effectively exploit the additional computing resources: On the one hand, in settings with heterogeneous servers existing protocols cannot fully utilize servers with higher performance capabilities. On the other hand, using more servers than the minimum number of replicas required for Byzantine fault tolerance in general does not lead to improved throughput and latency, but instead actually degrades performance.In this paper, we address these problems with Omada, a BFT protocol that is able to benefit from additional hardware resources. To achieve this property while still providing strong consistency, Omada first parallelizes agreement into multiple groups and then executes the requests handled by different groups in a deterministic order. By varying the number of requests to be ordered between groups as well as the number of groups that a replica participates in between servers, Omada offers the possibility to individually adjust the resource usage per server. Moreover, the fact that not all replicas need to take part in every group enables the protocol to exploit additional servers.