Lunch will be served at 11:45 AM.
Todayβs practical, high performance Byzantine Fault Tol- erant (BFT) consensus protocols operate in the partial syn- chrony model. However, existing protocols are inefficient when deployments are indeed partially synchronous. They deliver either low latency during fault-free, synchronous periods (good intervals) or robust recovery from events that interrupt progress (blips). At one end, traditional, view-based BFT protocols optimize for latency during good intervals, but, when blips occur, can suffer from performance degradation (hangovers) that can last beyond the return of a good interval. At the other end, modern DAG-based BFT protocols recover more gracefully from blips but exhibit lackluster latency dur- ing good intervals. To close the gap, this work presents Auto- bahn, a novel high-throughput BFT protocol that offers both low latency and seamless recovery from blips. By combining a highly parallel asynchronous data dissemination layer with a low-latency, partially synchronous consensus mechanism, Autobahn (π) avoids the hangovers incurred by traditional BFT protocols and (ππ) matches the throughput of state-of-the-art DAG-based BFT protocols while cutting their latency in half, matching the latency of traditional BFT protocols.
Neil Giridharan is a 5th-year PhD student in Computer Science at UC Berkeley advised by Professor Natacha Crooks. He is supported by the Meta PhD Research Fellowship. His research interests are in distributed systems with a focus on byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols. In particular, he has worked on making BFT consensus protocols more scalable and robust. Previously, he received his BA in Computer Science at UC Berkeley.