EDC: Efficient Distributed Coordination

Coordination services such as ZooKeeper are essential building blocks of today's data-center infrastructures as they provide processes of distributed applications with means to exchange messages, to perform leader election, to detect machine or process crashes, or to reliably store configuration data. Providing an anchor of trust for their client applications, coordination services have to meet strong requirements regarding stability and performance. Only this way, it is possible to ensure that a coordination service neither is a single point of failure nor becomes the bottleneck of the entire system.

To address drawbacks of state-of-the-art systems, the EDC project develops approaches that enable coordination services to meet the stability and performance demands. Amongst other things, this includes making these services resilient against both benign and malicious faults, integrating mechanisms for extending the service functionality at runtime in order to minimize communication and synchronization overhead, as well as designing system architectures for effectively and efficiently exploiting the potential of multi-core servers. Although focusing on coordination services, the developed concepts and techniques are expected to also be applicable to other domains, for example, replicated data stores.

Publications

DSN 2017	Rainer Schiekofer, Johannes Behl and Tobias Distler. Agora: A Dependable High-Performance Coordination Service for Multi-Cores. In Proceedings of the 47th International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN '17), pages 333–344, Denver, 26–29 June 2017. (BibTeX)
EuroSys 2015	Tobias Distler, Christopher Bahn, Alysson Bessani, Frank Fischer, and Flavio Junqueira. Extensible Distributed Coordination. In Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys '15), pages 143–158, Bordeaux, 21–24 April 2015. (BibTeX)
SDMCMM 2012	Tobias Distler, Frank Fischer, Rüdiger Kapitza, and Siqi Ling. Enhancing Coordination in Cloud Infrastructures with an Extendable Coordination Service. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Secure and Dependable Middleware for Cloud Monitoring and Management (SDMCMM '12), pages 1–6, Montreal, 4 December 2012. (BibTeX)
SSS 2012	Johannes Behl, Tobias Distler, and Rüdiger Kapitza. DQMP: A Decentralized Protocol to Enforce Global Quotas in Cloud Environments. In Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems (SSS '12), pages 217–231, Toronto, 1–4 October 2012. (BibTeX)

Source Code

Extensible ZooKeeper, an extensible variant of the ZooKeeper coordination service
Extensible DepSpace, an extensible variant of the DepSpace coordination service

Student Theses

Design and Implementation of an Extensible Byzantine Fault-tolerant Coordination Service: Supervisors: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat, Dr.-Ing. Tobias Distler

Entwicklung und Evaluation eines erweiterbaren Koordinierungsdienstes zur adaptiven Konfiguration von Cloud-Infrastrukturen: Supervisors: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat, Dr.-Ing. Tobias Distler

Project Partners

Alysson Bessani (Faculdade de Ciências/LaSIGE, Universidade de Lisboa)
Flavio Junqueira (Microsoft Research Cambridge)

People Involved in EDC at Erlangen

Tobias Distler	Frank Fischer	Christopher Bahn	Rainer Schiekofer