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Summary: The Paxos Register
Harry C. Li, Allen Clement, Amitanand S. Aiyer, and Lorenzo Alvisi
The University of Texas at Austin
Department of Computer Sciences
{harry, aclement, anand, lorenzo}@cs.utexas.edu
Abstract
We introduce the Paxos register to simplify and unify the
presentation of Paxos-style consensus protocols. We use our
register to show how Lamport's Classic Paxos and Castro
and Liskov's Byzantine Paxos are the same consensus proto-
col, but for different failure models. We also use our register
to compare and contrast Byzantine Paxos with Martin and
Alvisi's Fast Byzantine Consensus. The Paxos register is a
write-once register that exposes two important abstractions
for reaching consensus: (i) read and write operations that
capture how processes in Paxos protocols propose and de-
cide values and (ii) tokens that capture how these protocols
guarantee agreement despite partial failures. We encapsu-
late the differences of several Paxos-style protocols in the
implementation details of these abstractions.
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