Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

October 22, 2014

Consensus Filters

Filed under: Consensus,Filters — Patrick Durusau @ 7:43 pm

Consensus Filters by Yao Yujian.

From the post:

Suppose you have a huge number of robots/vehicles and you want all of them to track some global value, maybe the average of the weight of the fuel that each contains.

One way to do this is to have a master server that takes in everyone’s input and generates the output. So others can get it from the master. But this approach results in a single point of failure and a huge traffic to one server.

The other way is to let all robots talk to each other, so each robot will have information from others, which can then be used to compute the sum. Obviously this will incur a huge communication overhead. Especially if we need to generate the value frequently.

If we can tolerate approximate results, we have a third approach: consensus filters.

There are two advantages to consensus filters:

  1. Low communication overhead
  2. Approximate values can be used even without a consensus

Approximate results won’t be acceptable for all applications but where they are, consensus filters may be on your agenda.

March 12, 2014

Raft Consensus Algorithm

Filed under: Algorithms,Consensus,Consistency,Paxos — Patrick Durusau @ 1:34 pm

Raft: Understandable Distributed Consensus

A compelling visualization of the Raft consensus algorithm!

I first saw the visualization link in a tweet by Aaron Bull Schaefer.

The visualization closes with pointers to more information on Raft.

One pointer is to the Raft Consensus Algorithm website.

From the homepage:

Raft is a consensus algorithm that is designed to be easy to understand. It’s equivalent to Paxos in fault-tolerance and performance. The difference is that it’s decomposed into relatively independent subproblems, and it cleanly addresses all major pieces needed for practical systems. We hope Raft will make consensus available to a wider audience, and that this wider audience will be able to develop a variety of higher quality consensus-based systems than are available today.

There are links to videos + slides, the raft-dev Google Group, and numerous implementations of the Raft algorithm.

The other pointer from the visualization is to the Raft paper: In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm (PDF) by Diego Ongaro and John Ousterhout.

From the paper (section 4):

We had several goals in designing Raft: it must provide a complete and appropriate foundation for system building, so that it significantly reduces the amount of design work required of developers; it must be safe under all conditions and available under typical operating conditions; and it must be efficient for common operations. But our most important goal—and most difficult challenge—was understandability. It must be possible for a large audience to understand the algorithm comfortably. In addition, it must be possible to develop intuitions about the algorithm, so that system builders can make the extensions that are inevitable in real-world implementations.

Who would have thought that choosing more obvious/understandable approaches would have practical benefits?

There were numerous points in the design of Raft where we had to choose among alternative approaches. In these situations we evaluated the alternatives based on understandability: how hard is it to explain each alternative (for example, how complex is its state space, and does it have subtle implications?), and how easy will it be for a reader to completely understand the approach and its implications? Given a choice between an alternative that was concise but subtle and one that was longer (either in lines of code or explanation) but more obvious, we chose the more obvious approach. Fortunately, in most cases the more obvious approach was also more concise. (emphasis added)

Understandability, now there’s a useful requirement.

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