Live in the Express Lane

Authors: 

Patrick Jahnke, TU Darmstadt and SAP; Vincent Riesop, SAP; Pierre-Louis Roman and Pavel Chuprikov, Università della Svizzera italiana; Patrick Eugster, Università della Svizzera italiana, TU Darmstadt, and Purdue University

Abstract: 

We introduce Express-Lane (X-Lane), a novel system for mitigating interference in data center infrastructure to improve the liveness of coordination services. X-Lane follows a novel design from the ground up to achieve interactions with ultra-low latency in the single-digit microsecond range and jitter in the nanosecond range, while the remaining interaction is treated as usual. To show X-Lane's applicability and genericity we implemented and evaluated two services atop it on commodity hardware in a production environment of SAP SE: a failure detector (X-FD) with detection time under 10 μs and a Raft implementation (X-Raft) with latencies under 20 μs. We further show the smooth integrability of X-Lane services by replacing the replication protocol of Redis with X-Raft, making it strongly consistent while improving latency 18x and write throughput 1.5x.

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {273949,
author = {Patrick Jahnke and Vincent Riesop and Pierre-Louis Roman and Pavel Chuprikov and Patrick Eugster},
title = {Live in the Express Lane},
booktitle = {2021 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC 21)},
year = {2021},
isbn = {978-1-939133-23-6},
pages = {581--595},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc21/presentation/jahnke},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = jul
}

Presentation Video