FaTLease: scalable fault-tolerant lease negotiation with paxos

A lease is a token which grants its owner exclusive access to a resource for a defined span of time. In order to be able to tolerate failures, leases need to be coordinated by distributed processes. We present FaTLease, an algorithm for faulttolerant lease negotiation in distributed systems. It is built on the Paxos algorithm for distributed consensus, but avoids Paxos’ main performance bottleneck of requiring persistent state. This property makes our algorithm particularly useful for applications that can not dispense any disk bandwidth. Our experiments show that FaTLease scales up to tens of thousands of concurrent leases and can negotiate thousands of leases per second in both LAN and WAN environments. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.4.7 [Operating Systems]: Organization and Design— Distributed systems General Terms Algorithms, Theory

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: HPDC
• Authors: Felix Hupfeld, Björn Kolbeck, Jan Stender, Mikael Högqvist, Toni Cortes, Jonathan Martí, Jesus Malo
• Keywords: Algorithm, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Distributed Systems, HPDC 2008, Owner Exclusive Access