2020/03/26 by Vitor Enes, Carlos Baquero, Enes, Vitor +9 · 3 voices · 4 citations
Computer Science · #Distributed and Parallel Computing Systems #Distributed systems and fault tolerance #Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques #cs.DC
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2003.11789
openalex publication_date 2020/03/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Online applications now routinely replicate their data at multiple sites around the world. In this paper we present Atlas, the first state-machine replication protocol tailored for such planet-scale systems. Atlas does not rely on a distinguished leader, so clients enjoy the same quality of service independently of their geographical locations. Furthermore, client-perceived latency improves as we add sites closer to clients. To achieve this, Atlas minimizes the size of its quorums using an observation that concurrent data center failures are rare. It also processes a high percentage of accesses in a single round trip, even when these conflict. We experimentally demonstrate that Atlas consistently outperforms state-of-the-art protocols in planet-scale scenarios. In particular, Atlas is up to two times faster than Flexible Paxos with identical failure assumptions, and more than doubles the performance of Egalitarian Paxos in the YCSB benchmark.