Abstract

Lamport’s Paxos algorithm has long been synonymous with distributed consensus, although more recently it has been challenged by new algorithms such as Raft and VRR .

Last time I spoke to the SRG , I claimed that these algorithms (and many more like them) are difficult to deploy in practice as they demonstrate poor availability when deployed on real world network. However, my only evidence for this was a few whiteboard examples.

This talklet will present (a rough prototype of) Coracle, a simulation framework for consensus algorithms, using the popular RSM approach. The current demo provides a web interface, enabling the user to draw abstract heterogeneous networks, specify failures and set protocol parameters. Users can run different configurations side-by-side to compare the impact of different protocol options or network configurations.

Bring your laptops so you can have a go too! This is a practice for a demo at next week’s SIGCOMM .