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Abstract

Replication is essential for fault-tolerance. However, in in-memory systems, it is a source of high overhead. Remote direct memory access (RDMA) is attractive to create redundant copies of data, since it is low-latency and has no CPU overhead at the target. However, existing approaches still result in redundant data copying and active receivers. To ensure atomic data transfers, receivers check and apply only fully received messages. Tailwind is a zero-copy recovery-log replication protocol for scale-out in-memory databases. Tailwind is the first replication protocol that eliminates all CPU-driven data copying and fully bypasses target server CPUs, thus leaving backups idle. Tailwind ensures all writes are atomic by leveraging a protocol that detects incomplete RDMA transfers. Tailwind substantially improves replication throughput and response latency compared with conventional RPC-based replication. In symmetric systems where servers both serve requests and act as replicas, Tailwind also improves normal-case throughput by freeing server CPU resources for request processing. We implemented and evaluated Tailwind on RAMCloud, a low-latency in-memory storage system. Experiments show Tailwind improves RAMCloud's normal-case request processing throughput by 1.7x. It also cuts down writes median and 99th percentile latencies by 2x and 3x respectively.

Bibtex

@inproceedings{taleb:tailwind,
  author = { Yacine Taleb and Ryan Stutsman and Gabriel Antoniu and Toni Cortes },
  title = { {Tailwind: Fast and Atomic RDMA-based Replication} },
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2018 USENIX Annual Technical Conference},
  year = {2018},
  month = Jul,
  address = {Boston, MA},
  url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc18/presentation/taleb},
  publisher = {USENIX Association},
  series = {USENIX ATC '18},
}

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