The Part-Time Parliament

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Leslie Lamport
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 16(2), pages 133–169
May 1998

Recent archaeological discoveries on the island of Paxos reveal that the parliament functioned despite the peripatetic propensity of its part-time legislators. The legislators maintained consistent copies of the parliamentary record, despite their frequent forays from the chamber and the forgetfulness of their messengers. The Paxon parliament's protocol provides a new way of implementing the state machine approach to the design of distributed systems.

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