Worldwide Consensus

Abstract

Consensus is an abstraction of a variety of important challenges in dependable distributed systems. Thus a large body of theoretical knowledge is focused on modeling and solving consensus within diff erent system assumptions. However, moving from theory to practice imposes compromises and design decisions that may impact the elegance, trade-o ffs and correctness of theoretical appealing consensus protocols. In this paper we present the implementation and detailed analysis, in a real environment with a large number of nodes, of mutable consensus, a theoretical appealing protocol able to o ffer a wide range of trade-o ffs (called mutations) between decision latency and message complexity. The analysis sheds light on the fundamental behavior of the mutations, and leads to the identi cation of problems related to the real environment. Such problems are addressed without ever a ffecting the correctness of the theoretical proposal.