Abstract
As used in practice, traditional consensus algorithms require three message delays before any process can learn the chosen value. Fast Paxos is an extension of the classic Paxos algorithm that allows the value to be learned in two message delays. How and why the algorithm works are explained informally, and a TLA+ specification of the algorithm appears as an appendix.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Brasileiro, F., Greve, F., Mostefaoui, A., Raynal, M.: Consensus in one communication step. In: Malyshkin, V. (ed.) Parallel Computing Technologies (6th International Conference, PaCT 2001), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2127, pp. 42–50. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg New York (2001)
Castro, M., Liskov, B.: Practical byzantine fault tolerance. In: Proceedings of the Third Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, pp. 173–186. ACM, New York (1999)
Charron-Bost, B., Schiper, A.: Uniform consensus is harder than consensus (extended abstract). Tech. Rep. DSC/2000/028, École Polytechnique Fédérale de , Switzerland (2000). http://lsewww.epfl.ch/Publications/ById/263.html
De Prisco R., Lampson B., Lynch N. (2000) Revisiting the paxos algorithm. Theor. Comput. Sci. 243, 35–91
Fischer M.J., Lynch N., Paterson M.S. (1985) Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process. J. ACM 32(2): 374–382
Lamport, L.: Introduction to TLA. SRC Technical Note 1994-001, Digital Systems Research Center (1994). Currently available from http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-TN-1994-001.html
Lamport L. (1998) The part-time parliament. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst. 16(2): 133–169
Lamport, L.: A summary of TLA+ (2000). Currently available from http://research.microsoft.com/users/lamport/tla/tla.html or by searching the Web for the 21-letter string obtained by removing the – characters from uid-lamport-tla-homepage
Lamport L. (2001) Paxos made simple. ACM SIGACT News (Distributed Computing Column) 32(4): 18–25
Lamport, L.: Specifying Systems. Addison-Wesley, Boston (2003). Also available on the Web via a link at http://lamport.org.
Lamport, L.: Lower bounds for asynchronous consensus. Tech. Rep. MSR-TR-2004-71, Microsoft Research (2004). Currently available from http://research.microsoft.com/users/lamport/pubs/pubs.html, or by searching the Web for the 23-letter string obtained by removing the – characters from all-lamports-pubs-onthe-web
Lampson B.W. How to build a highly available system using consensus. In: Babaoglu O. Marzullo K. (eds) Distributed Algorithms. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1151, pp. 1–17. Springer Berlin, Heidelberg New York (1996)
Martin, J.P., Alvisi, L.: Fast byzantine consensus. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2005). IEEE Computer Society, Yokohama (2005) (in press)
Pedone F., Schiper A. (2002) Handling message semantics with generic broadcast. Distributed Computing 15(2): 97–107
Pedone, F., Schiper, A., Urbán, P., Cavin, D.: Solving agreement problems with weak ordering oracles. In: Proceedings of the 4th European Dependable Computing Conference (EDCC-4). Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2485, pp. 44–61. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg New York (2002)
Zielinski, P.: Optimistic generic broadcast. In: Fraigniaud, P. (ed.) DISC ’05: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Distributed Computing, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 3724, pp. 369–383. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg New York (2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Lamport, L. Fast Paxos. Distrib. Comput. 19, 79–103 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-006-0005-x
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-006-0005-x