Gorums

Gorums [1] is a novel framework for building fault tolerant distributed systems. Gorums offers a flexible and simple quorum call abstraction, used to communicate with a set of processes, and to collect and process their responses. Gorums provides separate abstractions for (a) selecting processes for a quorum call and (b) processing replies. These abstractions simplify the main control flow of protocol implementations, especially for quorum-based systems, where only a subset of the replies to a quorum call need to be processed.

Gorums uses code generation to produce an RPC library that clients can use to invoke quorum calls. Gorums is a wrapper around the gRPC library. Services are defined using the protocol buffers interface definition language.

System Requirements

To build and deploy Gorums, you need the following software installed:

• Protobuf compiler (protoc)
• Make
• Ansible (used by benchmark script)

Contributors Guide

We value your contributions. Before starting a contribution, please reach out to us by posting on an existing issue or creating a new one. Students and other contributors are encouraged to follow these guidelines:

• We recommend using VSCode with the following plugins
  • Go plugin with the
    • gopls language server enabled
    • golangci-lint enabled
  • Code Spell Checker
  • markdownlint
  • vscode-proto3
• Code should regularly be merged into master through pull requests.

Examples

The original EPaxos implementation modified to use Gorums can be found here.

A collection of different algorithms for reconfigurable atomic storage implemented using Gorums can be found here.

Documentation

• User guide
• Developer guide

Publications

[1] Tormod Erevik Lea, Leander Jehl, and Hein Meling. Towards New Abstractions for Implementing Quorum-based Systems. In 37th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), Jun 2017.

[2] Sebastian Pedersen, Hein Meling, and Leander Jehl. An Analysis of Quorum-based Abstractions: A Case Study using Gorums to Implement Raft. In Proceedings of the 2018 Workshop on Advanced Tools, Programming Languages, and PLatforms for Implementing and Evaluating Algorithms for Distributed systems.

Authors

• Hein Meling
• John Ingve Olsen
• Tormod Erevik Lea
• Leander Jehl