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Fault-tolerant
replicated database systems consume significantly less energy than the
compute-intensive proof-of-work blockchain. Thus, they are promising
technologies for the building blocks that assemble global financial
infrastructure. To facilitate global scaling, clustered replication
protocols are essential in orchestrating nodes into clusters based on
proximity. However, the existing approaches often assume a homogeneous
and fixed model in which the number of nodes across clusters is the
same and fixed, and often limited to a fail-stop fault model. This
paper presents heterogeneous and reconfigurable clustered replication
for the general environment with arbitrary failures. In particular, we
present Hamava, a fault-tolerant reconfigurable geo-replication that
allows dynamic membership: replicas are allowed to join and leave
clusters. We formally state and prove the safety and liveness
properties of the protocol. Furthermore, our replication protocol is
consensus-agnostic, meaning each cluster can utilize any local
replication mechanism. In our comprehensive evaluation, we instantiate
our replication with both HotStuff and BFT-SMaRt. Experiments on
geo-distributed deployments on Google Cloud demonstrate that members of
clusters can be reconfigured without affecting transaction processing,
and that heterogeneity of clusters may significantly improve throughput.
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