Linearizable State Machine Replication of State-Based CRDTs without Logs
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General solutions of state machine replication have to ensure that all replicas apply the same commands in the same order, even in the presence of failures. Such strict ordering incurs high synchronization costs caused by distributed consensus or by the use of a leader. This paper presents a protocol for linearizable state machine replication of conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs) that neither requires consensus nor a leader. By leveraging the properties of state-based CRDTs - in particular the monotonic growth of a join semilattice - synchronization overhead is greatly reduced. In addition, updates just need a single round trip and modify the state `in-place' without the need for a log. Furthermore, the message size overhead for coordination consists of a single counter per message. While reads in the presence of concurrent updates are not wait-free without a coordinator, we show that more than 97 under highly concurrent accesses. Our protocol achieves high throughput without auxiliary processes like command log management or leader election. It is well suited for all practical scenarios that need linearizable access on CRDT data on a fine-granular scale.
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