Several directions are moving forward on the Lagniappe front.

Byzantine-fault tolerance is still our big target application. We have learned many interesting things about BFT, and how it differs from the traditional network applications we originally looked at.

We are currently in the process of writing BFT in Lagniappe, and in the next few weeks we should start to have the beginnings of the application take shape.

One interesting thing that Lagniappe allows us to do is look at BFT in terms of layered development and testing. The highly modular structure of Lagniappe makes this much easier. The small WiP presentation that I gave at OSDI talks about automatically applying fault-tolerance protocols to Lagniappe applications, and this layered breakdown of BFT is starting to clear up the details of how to make such automatic fault tolerance happen.

Stay tuned as we have exciting things that should be exiting the pipeline in the next few months!

Labels: automatic fault tolerance, BFT, OSDI

I've uploaded the WiP slides from OSDI.

The picture here has also been updated to properly reflect the structure of the lagniappe compiler in terms of the high-level transformations that occur to the models as we do our source to source translation.

There have been some updates in the code repository as we've added a replicated, ordered queue application (one of the components of a BFT RSM).

Thanks!

Labels: BFT, OSDI

Post OSDI I'll update the site on all of the new stuff that has been built into Lagniappe in the last month. It's really coming together, but there is still so much to do before the deadline.

Labels: OSDI

So I've checked in code (in both the library and compiler) that automatically generates adaptation triggers based on the specifics of the application and system. I did a quick test and it does, in fact, generate different triggers for different hardware platforms, so that was a nice sanity check.

I've also now officially put all of the code under the GPL.

I'm going to spend the next few days on getting some of the paper up-to-date, and then I will start to tackle the smart mapping issue. With those two features on the books, the system will be pretty powerful. We will automatically generate policies to efficiently adapt resources to handle changes in workload based on your specific application and hardware platform. I think that is pretty powerful, but yes, I'm biased.

Labels: adaptation, mapping, OSDI, writing

Things are starting to gel in my head and I'm starting a long section of implementation. Many features to get up and running and tested. Testing is something that I'm actually going to have to put some thought in. It is easy to test particular features in isolation, but the real trick in this work is watching the system deal with large-scale changes in incoming traffic. Generating the traffic that will properly trigger this activity and model real-life traces will be challenging.

The machines are here and installed in the machine room. They should be completely functional soon.

I will try to discuss the implementation as I go along.

Labels: new hardware, OSDI, traces