Waverunner - An Elegant Approach to Hardware Acceleration of State Machine Replication

Explore an innovative approach to accelerating state machine replication (SMR) using FPGA-based SmartNICs in this conference talk from NSDI '23. Discover how Waverunner, a hybrid software/hardware system, achieves high performance by focusing hardware acceleration on data replication while leaving complex routines to traditional software implementation. Learn about the benefits of this elegant solution, including network-speed performance with low latency in common cases and simplified handling of rare situations like leader failure and recovery. Gain insights into the practical advantages of Waverunner for hardware-accelerated SMR, offering significant performance improvements with minimal added complexity and implementation effort.