Generalized Paxos
Generalized consensus explores the relationship between the operations of a distributed state machine and the consensus protocol used to maintain consistency of that state machine. The main discovery involves optimizations of the consensus protocol when conflicting proposals could be applied to the state machine in any order. i.e.: The operations proposed by the conflicting proposals are commutative operations of the state machine.
In such cases, the conflicting operations can both be accepted, avoiding the delays required for resolving conflicts and re-proposing the rejected operation.
This concept is further generalized into ever-growing sets of commutative operations, some of which are known to be stable (and thus may be executed). The protocol tracks these sets of operations, ensuring that all proposed commutative operations of one set are stabilized before allowing any non-commuting operation to become stable.
Read more about this topic: Paxos (computer Science)
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