2021-The Problem of Distributed Consensus: In the past, it’s been difficult to analyze the more general setup where there is no rigid notion of either space or time. But this is exactly the setup in our new Physics Project, and so there’s now the potential to use its formalism and results (as well as intuition imported from physics) to make further progress.
2021-Stateright #Project#: Correctly implementing distributed algorithms such as the Paxos and Raft consensus protocols is notoriously difficult due to inherent nondetermism such as message reordering by network devices. Stateright is a Rust actor library that aims to solve this problem by providing an embedded model checker, a UI for exploring system behavior (demo), and a lightweight actor runtime. It also features a linearizability tester that can be run within the model checker for more exhaustive test coverage than similar solutions such as Jepsen.