CAREER: Storage-Aware Fault Tolerance

Fault-tolerant storage systems are at the heart of modern datacenters. These systems ensure that large-scale services (e.g., search, social networking) and critical services (e.g., e-commerce, healthcare) can reliably access essential data, even in the face of failures. However, a pressing concern when designing fault-tolerant storage systems is that their strong fault-tolerance guarantees come at the cost of performance. For instance, a fault-tolerant key-value store built using existing approaches can perform up to 20x worse than a stand-alone version of the store (that does not tolerate failures). This project aims to build fault-tolerant storage systems that closely approximate the performance of fault-intolerant (non-replicated) storage servers. The project will achieve this goal by systematically rethinking widely used fault-tolerance paradigms. This project will develop novel fault-tolerance protocols and abstractions and build new practical systems. In particular, it will first develop a new replication protocol optimized for modern storage devices. Second, it will explore a novel CPU-free replication approach that unlocks the full potential of remote direct memory access (RDMA). Third, it will realize a new fault-tolerance architecture tailored for emerging disaggregated datacenters. Finally, it will develop a new shared log abstraction for storage applications. The solutions developed in this project will enable the development of reliable and performant systems, eliminating the need to make compromises that threaten the data safety of critical applications. The effort will significantly contribute to education and outreach through new course offerings to introduce students to distributed systems research and hands-on labs to equip students to use modern hardware. The project will also broaden participation in computing through doctoral workshops and engagement in undergraduate research. The project will also bring distributed systems to a broader audience (including K-12 students) through new interactive frameworks. All the artifacts from the project will be made openly available with necessary documentation for ease of use. Finally, the PI will collaborate with industry partners to implement project results within real-world systems. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.