Shanghai research team develops efficient asynchronous consensus algorithm

Translated from: People's Daily Client

Xie Weiqun

The 29th ACM Operating System Principles Conference (SOSP) was recently held in Germany. The asynchronous consensus algorithm MyTumbler, jointly developed by Ant Blockchain Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, was successfully selected for the conference, showcasing the new achievements made by the Chinese scientific research team in the field of global consensus algorithm technology.

It is introduced that consensus algorithm is an algorithm used to ensure that all nodes in a distributed system reach consensus, similar to the process of members in a group reaching consensus through communication, discussion, and weighing the pros and cons.

In daily life, eating, ordering dishes, and voting in meetings are all manifestations of "consensus". In the digital world, people's communication, cooperation, and decision-making in various fields will take place in the digital environment. A reliable and efficient method is needed to ensure consistency and trust among all parties, which requires the use of consensus algorithms to accelerate the consensus process in the digital world.

How to improve the key performance of asynchronous consensus algorithms is a challenge facing the world, and to this day, it is still rare for asynchronous consensus algorithms to be applied in practice that ensure efficiency and can adapt to various complex network scenarios. It is reported that MyTumbler can achieve a balance between the two, providing high-performance services regardless of network quality or network load. In the experiment of deploying 100 nodes in a global wide area network, the consensus throughput of MyTumbler reached 130000 and 650000 TPS at transaction sizes of 1KB and 200B, respectively, which is more than five times higher than the semi synchronous algorithm and one time higher than the latest Tusk asynchronous algorithm, while the latency is reduced by half.

According to the introduction of the paper, firstly, MyTumbler allows nodes to flexibly propose in the form of timestamps, allowing proposals from remote nodes to be fairly consensus linked, which is a new consensus paradigm; Secondly, allowing idle nodes to skip their own proposal rounds to avoid unnecessary consensus on empty proposals, which is pioneering in asynchronous consensus; Thirdly, optimize the consensus process by introducing fast channels to avoid unnecessary coin tossing and reduce 7 rounds of message interaction to a minimum of 3 rounds.