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🗳️ The Paxos Consensus Protocol: How Distributed Systems Agree on One Value

Explore how the Paxos consensus protocol lets unreliable, message-losing nodes agree on a single value, and see why it underpins systems like Chubby and the Raft family.

Distributed & Parallel Computing3DModerate60 FPS

This simulator demonstrates how proposers and acceptors exchange numbered prepare and accept messages to converge on one chosen value even when some nodes fail or messages are dropped.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

This simulator demonstrates how proposers and acceptors exchange numbered prepare and accept messages to converge on one chosen value even when some nodes fail or messages are dropped.

🎮 How to Use

Trigger proposals from different proposer nodes, adjust failure and message-loss rates, and step through each round to watch promises, acceptances, and the eventual chosen value emerge.

💡 Did You Know?

Leslie Lamport originally presented Paxos in 1990 as a whimsical story about a fictional Greek island's part-time parliament, and the paper was considered so hard to parse that he later wrote a simplified version just to help readers understand it.

⚙ Under the hood

Explore how the Paxos consensus protocol lets unreliable, message-losing nodes agree on a single value, and see why it underpins systems like Chubby and the Raft family.

paxosdistributed-systemsconsensusfault-tolerancequorumraftchubbyreplication

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install