Falcon

Enhancing Asynchronous BFT Consensus with Fewer Agreements and Partial Sorting

Quick Start

Falcon BFT is written in Rust, but all benchmarking scripts are written in Python and run with Fabric. To deploy and benchmark a testbed of 4 nodes on your local machine, clone the repo and install the python dependencies:

$ git clone https://github.com/ac-dcz/Falcon
$ cd Falcon/benchmark
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

You also need to install Clang (required by rocksdb) and tmux (which runs all nodes and clients in the background). Finally, run a local benchmark using fabric:

$ fab local

This command may take a long time the first time you run it (compiling rust code in release mode may be slow) and you can customize a number of benchmark parameters in fabfile.py. When the benchmark terminates, it displays a summary of the execution similarly to the one below.

-----------------------------------------
 SUMMARY:
-----------------------------------------
 + CONFIG:
 Protocol: 0
 DDOS attack: False
 Committee size: 4 nodes
 Input rate: 10,000 tx/s
 Transaction size: 512 B
 Faults: 0 nodes
 Execution time: 32 s

 Consensus timeout delay: 2,000 ms
 Consensus sync retry delay: 10,000 ms
 Consensus max payloads size: 500 B
 Consensus min block delay: 0 ms
 Mempool queue capacity: 10,000 B
 Mempool max payloads size: 15,000 B
 Mempool min block delay: 0 ms

 + RESULTS:
 Consensus TPS: 10,042 tx/s
 Consensus BPS: 5,141,658 B/s
 Consensus latency: 12 ms

 End-to-end TPS: 10,001 tx/s
 End-to-end BPS: 5,120,320 B/s
 End-to-end latency: 44 ms
-----------------------------------------

AWS Benchmarks

The following steps will explain that how to run benchmarks on Alibaba cloud across multiple data centers (WAN).

1. Set up your AWS credentials

Set up your AWS credentials to enable programmatic access to your account from your local machine. These credentials will authorize your machine to create, delete, and edit instances on your AWS account programmatically. First of all, find your 'access key id' and 'secret access key'. Then, create a file ~/.AWS/access.json with the following content:

{
  "AccessKey ID": "your accessKey ID",
  "AccessKey Secret": "your accessKey Secret"
}

2. Add your SSH public key to your AWS account

You must now add your SSH public key to your AWS account. This operation is manual and needs to be repeated for each AWS region that you plan to use. Upon importing your key, AWS requires you to choose a 'name' for your key; ensure you set the same name on all AWS regions. This SSH key will be used by the python scripts to execute commands and upload/download files to your AWS instances. If you don't have an SSH key, you can create one using ssh-keygen:

ssh-keygen -f ~/.ssh/AWS

3. Configure the testbed

The file settings.json located in Falcon/benchmark contains all the configuration parameters of the testbed to deploy. Its content looks as follows:

{
  "key": {
    "name": "Falcon",
    "path": "/root/.ssh/id_rsa",
    "accesskey": "/root/.aws/access.json"
  },
  "ports": {
    "consensus": 8000
  },
  "instances": {
    "type": "m5d.xlarge",
    "regions": ["us-east-1", "eu-north-1", "ap-northeast-1", "ap-southeast-2"]
  }
}

The first block (key) contains information regarding your SSH key and Access Key:

"key": {
    "name": "Falcon",
    "path": "/root/.ssh/id_rsa",
    "accesskey": "/root/.AWS/access.json"
}

The second block (ports) specifies the TCP ports to use:

"ports": {
    "consensus": 8000
}

The the last block (instances) specifies theAWS Instance Typeand the AWS regions to use:

"instances": {
    "type": "ecs.g6e.xlarge",
    "regions": [
        "eu-central-1",
        "ap-northeast-2",
        "ap-southeast-1",
        "us-east-1"
    ]
}

4. Create a testbed

The AWS instances are orchestrated with Fabric from the file fabfile.py (located in BFT-MVBA/benchmark) you can list all possible commands as follows:

The command fab create creates new AWS instances; open fabfile.py and locate the create task:

@task
def create(ctx, nodes=2):
    ...

The parameter nodes determines how many instances to create in each AWS region. That is, if you specified 4 AWS regions as in the example of step 3, setting nodes=2 will creates a total of 8 machines:

$ fab create

Creating 8 instances |██████████████████████████████| 100.0%
Waiting for all instances to boot...
Successfully created 8 new instances

You can then install goland on the remote instances with fab install:

$ fab install

Installing rust and cloning the repo...
Initialized testbed of 10 nodes

Next,you should upload the executable file

$ fab uploadexec

5. Run a benchmark

$ fab remote