HADES: Hardware-Assisted Distributed Transactions in the Age of Fast Networks and SmartNICs

Transactional-based distributed storage applications such as key-value stores and databases are widely used in the cloud. Recently, the hardware on which these applications run has been rapidly improving, with faster networks and powerful network interface cards (NICs). A result of these hardware advances is that the inefficiencies of distributed software have become increasingly obvious.

To address this problem, we analyze the sources of software overhead in these distributed transactional applications and propose new hardware structures to eliminate them. The proposed hardware includes Bloom filters for a variety of tasks and SmartNICs for efficient remote communication. We then develop HADES, a new distributed transactional protocol that leverages this hardware to support low-overhead distributed transactions. We also propose a hybrid hardware-software implementation of HADES. Our evaluation shows that HADES increases the throughput of distributed transactional workloads by 2.7× on average over a state-of-the-art distributed transactional system.