Frugal Distributed algorithms at Network layer – FrugalDinet

In recent years, innovative hardware technologies have emerged to enhance distributed computations in datacenters. Programmable switches enable packet processing with user-defined functionality on packets in transit. Similarly, SmartNIC DPUs offload data-centric computations from host CPUs.

Simultaneously, the urgency of climate and energy crises has emphasized the need for frugal architectures. These technologies present an opportunity to reduce overall network traffic from distributed services, offloading computations from CPUs to the network itself. They should be integrated in designing fundamental distributed system components like failure detectors, group membership, reliable broadcast, or consensus.

We propose FrugalDinet a framework to build reliable, low-cost distributed services, leveraging these technologies which minimizes CPU usage in datacenters and subsequently their energy consumption. Our holistic approach extends key algorithms such as leader election, group membership and broadcasting, necessary for the creation of reliable services. We intend not only to offload algorithmic logics on network elements, but also to make opportunistic use of the information available at the switch level.

We also plan to introduce a new high-level programming language facilitating transparent utilization of these frugal, reliable distributed services.

The implemented frugal algorithms and programming abstractions will be applied to design a distributed transaction system