ThunderCore Chain

PaLa is a byzantine fault tolerant consensus protocol invented by T-H. Hubert Chan, Rafael Pass, and Elaine Shi. It can achieve low latency and high throughput in a partially synchronous network setting. PaLa allows support seamless proposer switch with no delay in normal operation. When there is a network partition, the protocol switches proposers with little delay (say 6s) to keep liveness as long as there are at least one honest proposer and 2/3 voters in a single partition. All honest nodes maintain consistency no matter how the network is partitioned.

Distributed Consensus in Practice

To fill the gap between the academic paper and a working product, our developers discussed the details of PaLa with Prof. Elaine Shi and came up with the pseudocode. The pseudocode is the reference for this project and is a good starting point for understanding this beautiful consensus protocol.

Development Environment Setup

Compile with local go(recommand version 1.16)

$ make pala

Run all tests

$ make test

Localchain

You need Docker

Please refer to https://docs.docker.com/install/ for Docker installation

Start or Stop localchain

$ cd ./scripts
$ python3 ./chain.py start
$ python3 ./chain.py stop
$ python3 ./chain.py start --help  # for more options

Single Process Pala

clear the datadir and launch the single process

$ ./scripts/test/pala-dev -c
$ ./scripts/test/pala-dev

Contributing

Feel free to fork and make PRs. We are glad to see feedback from the community and make the implementation and tests more complete.

Supporting Documents

Doubly Pipelined PaLa pseudocode: understand how the consensus protocol is implemented in practice.
Terminology and data flow: understand how PaLa works via examples of different scenarios.
Software architecture: understand the architecture and how objects interact.
Goroutines and Channels: understand the concurrency design.
Slides for PaLa talk: Slides for a talk on PaLa and PaLa software architecture given by Chia-Hao Lo @ COSCUP 2019. A recording of the talk itself given in Mandarin is available here.

thundercore/thundercore-chain