| Summary: | In this paper, we explore how a programmable forwarding plane offered
by a new breed of network switches might naturally accelerate
consensus protocols, specifically focusing on Paxos. The performance
of consensus protocols has long been a concern. By implementing Paxos
in the forwarding plane, we are able to significantly increase
throughput and reduce latency. Our P4-based implementation running on
an ASIC in isolation can process over 2.5 billion consensus messages
per second, a four orders of magnitude improvement in throughput
over a widely-used software implementation. This effectively removes
consensus as a bottleneck for distributed applications in data
centers. Beyond sheer performance, our approach offers several other
important benefits: it readily lends itself to formal verification;
it does not rely on any additional network hardware; and as a full Paxos
implementation, it makes only very weak assumptions about the network.
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