Consensus as a Network Service

The Paxos protocol is the foundation for building many fault-tolerant distributed systems and services. Given the importance of Paxos, and performance improvements to the protocol would have a significant impact on data-center infrastructure. We argue that implementing Paxos in network devices would significantly improve its performance. This talk describes an implementation of Paxos in P4, as well as our on-going efforts to evaluate the implementation on Netronome intelligent server adapters. Implementing Paxos provides a critical use case for P4, and will help drive the requirements for data plane languages in general. In the long term, we imagine that consensus could someday be offered as a network service. Huynh Tu Dang Italian University of Switzerland Huynh Tu Dang is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Faculty of Informatics at Università della Svizzera Italiana. His research focuses on fault-tolerant distributed systems and application of software-defined networking (SDN). Previously, he worked as a research assistant at Ho Chi Minh International University and was an intern at INRIA, Nice-Sophia Antipolis on BtrPlace project. He received his Bachelor's degree from the School of Computer Science and Engineering at Ho Chi Minh International University.