Memory disaggregation is an emerging data center architecture that improves resource utilization and scalability. Replication is key to ensure the fault tolerance of applications, but replicating shared data in disaggregated memory is hard. We propose SWARM (Swift WAit-free Replication in disaggregated Memory), the first replication scheme for in-disaggregated-memory shared objects to provide (1) single-roundtrip reads and writes in the common case, (2) strong consistency (linearizability), and (3) strong liveness (wait-freedom). SWARM makes two independent contributions. The first is Safe-Guess, a novel wait-free replication protocol with single-roundtrip operations. The second is In-n-Out, a novel technique to provide conditional atomic update and atomic retrieval of large buffers in disaggregated memory in one roundtrip. Using SWARM, we build SWARM-KV, a low-latency, strongly consistent and highly available disaggregated key-value store. We evaluate SWARM-KV and find that it has marginal latency overhead compared to an unreplicated key-value store, and that it offers much lower latency and better availability than FUSEE, a state-of-the-art replicated disaggregated key-value store.

We propose uBFT, the first State Machine Replication (SMR) system to achieve microsecond-scale latency in data centers, while using only 2f+1 replicas to tolerate f Byzantine failures. The Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) provided by uBFT is essential as pure crashes appear to be a mere illusion with real-life systems reportedly failing in many unexpected ways. uBFT relies on a small non-tailored trusted computing base—disaggregated memory—and consumes a practically bounded amount of memory. uBFT is based on a novel abstraction called Consistent Tail Broadcast, which we use to prevent equivocation while bounding memory. We implement uBFT using RDMA-based disaggregated memory and obtain an end-to-end latency of as little as 10 us. This is at least 50× faster than MinBFT, a state-of-the-art 2f+1 BFT SMR based on Intel’s SGX. We use uBFT to replicate two KV-stores (Memcached and Redis), as well as a financial order matching engine (Liquibook). These applications have low latency (up to 20 us) and become Byzantine tolerant with as little as 10 us more. The price for uBFT is a small amount of reliable disaggregated memory (less than 1 MiB), which in our prototype consists of a small number of memory servers connected through RDMA and replicated for fault tolerance.