Related papers: Leopard: Towards High Throughput-Preserving BFT fo…

Blockchain technology sparked renewed interest in planetary-scale Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) state machine replication (SMR). While recent works predominantly focused on improving the scalability and throughput of these protocols, few…

We study a well-known communication abstraction called Byzantine Reliable Broadcast (BRB). This abstraction is central in the design and implementation of fault-tolerant distributed systems, as many fault-tolerant distributed applications…

The concept of distributed consensus originated in the 1970s and gained widespread attention following Leslie Lamport's influential publication on the Byzantine Generals Problem in the 1980s. Over the past five decades, distributed…

Checkpointing to preserve training states is crucial during the development of Large Foundation Models (LFMs), for training resumption upon various failures or changes in GPU resources and parallelism configurations. In addition, saved…

Breadth-First Search (BFS) is a building block used in a wide array of graph analytics and is used in various network analysis domains: social, road, transportation, communication, and much more. Over the last two decades, network sizes…

In this paper we address the problem of performing statistical inference for large scale data sets i.e., Big Data. The volume and dimensionality of the data may be so high that it cannot be processed or stored in a single computing node. We…

Every BFT consensus protocol uses collision-resistant hashes to compare validator state. Collision resistance destroys distance: two validators agreeing on 19 of 20 transactions produce unrelated hashes, indistinguishable from validators…

Block Floating-Point (BFP) is emerging as an attractive data format for edge Neural Processing Units (NPUs), combining wide dynamic range with high hardware efficiency. However, its behavior under hardware faults and suitability for…

Blockchain technology enhances transparency by maintaining a distributed ledger among mutually untrusting parties. Despite its advantages, scalability and availability remain critical bottlenecks that hinder widespread adoption. The…

Large scale cryptocurrencies require the participation of millions of participants and support economic activity of billions of dollars, which has led to new lines of work in binary Byzantine Agreement (BBA) and consensus. The new work aims…

Partially synchronous Byzantine consensus protocols typically structure their execution into a sequence of views, each with a designated leader process. The key to guaranteeing liveness in these protocols is to ensure that all correct…

Large language models (LLMs), with their billions of parameters, pose substantial challenges for deployment on edge devices, straining both memory capacity and computational resources. Block Floating Point (BFP) quantisation reduces memory…

We propose, implement, and evaluate NxBFT, a resilient and efficient State Machine Replication protocol using Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). NxBFT focuses on a "Not eXactly Byzantine" (NxB) operating model as a middle ground between…

Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) is a core library in scientific computing and machine learning. This paper presents FT-BLAS, a new implementation of BLAS routines that not only tolerates soft errors on the fly, but also provides…

Threshold cryptography is essential for many blockchain protocols. For example, many protocols rely on threshold common coin to implement asynchronous consensus, leader elections, and provide support for randomized applications. Similarly,…

Fine-tuning pretrained models is a standard and effective workflow in modern machine learning. However, robust fine-tuning (RFT), which aims to simultaneously achieve adaptation to a downstream task and robustness to adversarial examples,…

Crash fault tolerant (CFT) consensus algorithms are commonly used in scenarios where system components are trusted -- e.g., enterprise settings and government infrastructure. However, CFT consensus can be broken by even a single corrupt…

With the increasing scale of models, the need for efficient distributed training has become increasingly urgent. Recently, many synchronous pipeline parallelism approaches have been proposed to improve training throughput. However, these…

Follow-the-Leader (FTL) is an intuitive sequential prediction strategy that guarantees constant regret in the stochastic setting, but has terrible performance for worst-case data. Other hedging strategies have better worst-case guarantees…

There is no shortage of state machine replication protocols. From Generalized Paxos to EPaxos, a huge number of replication protocols have been proposed that achieve high throughput and low latency. However, these protocols all have two…