paxos – keeping simple

Lecture notes on Paxos

April 21, 2022 vy theory

PAXOS – (c) Victor Yodaiken, 2022 These are the lecture notes, or see the paper below 1. Really clever distributed consensus algorithm by Leslie Lamport

Spanner in the works

November 10, 2018 vy software business, systems

The developers of Google’s Spanner database built an interesting system but chose to build their own clock synchronization technology instead of getting a more precise

Chang-Maxemchuk atomic broadcast

September 2, 2016 vy academics, systems

The Chang-Maxemchuk algorithm (US Patent 4,725,834 ) solves atomic broadcast (and in-order broadcast) problems for distributed networks in a far simpler and more efficient way than some

Distributed consensus and network reliability

August 30, 2016 vy academics, systems

All of the distributed consensus algorithms I have been reviewing recently (Paxos, Raft, Zab, Chang Maxemchuck, Viewstamped, … ) are based on a number of

circularity problems in distributed consensus

August 25, 2016 vy academics, archived, systems, theory

Distributed consensus involves organizing a collection of independent agents – processes or network sites – to agree on some value or sequence of values. Many

Paxos and other consensus algorithms and the unaccountable love for asynchrony

January 24, 2016 vy systems

I’ve been looking at Paxos and Raft and Zab and other algorithms that can loosely be called “consensus” algorithms because we want to see where we can

More on Fischer, Lynch, Patterson and the parrot theorem.

January 14, 2016 vy academics, systems

I’m thinking about distributed consensus algorithms, timestamping, and databases and if you read that literature you will see many references to the Fischer, Lynch, Paterson