Phase 42.1 Q&A — ConsensusEngine: Raft/Paxos & Byzantine Fault Tolerance

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ConsensusEngine — Questions & Answers

Ask questions about the ConsensusEngine implementation, Raft/Paxos protocols, and Byzantine fault tolerance.

Common Questions

1. When should I use Raft vs Paxos vs PBFT?

   • Raft: crash-fault tolerance, understandability, strong leader model
   • Paxos: theoretical foundation, flexible variants (Multi-Paxos, Fast Paxos)
   • PBFT: Byzantine environments where nodes may behave arbitrarily

2. How does the FLP impossibility affect our implementation?

   • We use randomized timeouts (Raft) or partial synchrony assumptions
   • Safety is always guaranteed; liveness requires eventual synchrony

3. How does gradient consensus differ from traditional consensus?

   • Approximate agreement is acceptable (vs exact value agreement)
   • Higher throughput requirements, lower consistency requirements
   • Can leverage AllReduce patterns from distributed training

4. How many nodes can be Byzantine?

   • PBFT tolerates f < n/3 Byzantine nodes (e.g., 1 of 4, 2 of 7)

Reference issue: #841 | Planning: #840