Publications related to Planetary-Scale Byzantine Fault Tolerance

Fly-Swat or Cannon? Cost-Effective Language Model Choice via Meta-Modeling

Robert West, Maxime Jean Julien Peyrard, Marija Sakota

Generative language models (LMs) have become omnipresent across data science. For a wide variety of tasks, inputs can be phrased as natural language prompts for an LM, from whose output the solution can then be extracted. LM performance has consistently be ...

Assoc Computing Machinery2024

Quantifying the Unknown: Data-Driven Approaches and Applications in Energy Systems

Paul Scharnhorst

In light of the challenges posed by climate change and the goals of the Paris Agreement, electricity generation is shifting to a more renewable and decentralized pattern, while the operation of systems like buildings is increasingly electrified. This calls ...

EPFL2024

On the Theory and Practice of Modern Secure Messaging

Daniel Patrick Collins

Billions of people now have conversations daily over the Internet. A large portion of this communication takes place via secure messaging protocols that offer "end-to-end encryption'" guarantees and resilience to compromise like the widely-used Double Ratc ...

EPFL2024

Towards General-Purpose Decentralized Computing with Permissionless Extensibility

Enis Ceyhun Alp

Smart contracts have emerged as the most promising foundations for applications of the blockchain technology. Even though smart contracts are expected to serve as the backbone of the next-generation web, they have several limitations that hinder their wide ...

EPFL2024

Byzantine consensus is Θ(n^2): the Dolev-Reischuk bound is tight even in partial synchrony!

Rachid Guerraoui, Jovan Komatovic, Manuel José Ribeiro Vidigueira, Pierre Philippe Civit, Vincent Gramoli, Seth Gilbert

The Dolev-Reischuk bound says that any deterministic Byzantine consensus protocol has (at least) quadratic (in the number of processes) communication complexity in the worst case: given a system with n processes and at most f < n/3 failures, any solution t ...

2023

Building Strongly-Consistent Systems Resilient to Failures, Partitions, and Slowdowns

Cristina Basescu

Distributed systems designers typically strive to improve performance and preserve availability despite failures or attacks; but, when strong consistency is also needed, they encounter fundamental limitations. The bottleneck is in replica coordination, whi ...

EPFL2023

Hypergraph-Based Fast Distributed AC Power Flow Optimization

Colin Neil Jones, Yuning Jiang, Yingzhao Lian, Xinliang Dai

This paper presents a novel distributed approach for solving AC power flow (PF) problems. The optimization problem is reformulated into a distributed form using a communication structure corresponding to a hypergraph, by which complex relationships between ...

IEEE2023

Byzantine-Resilient Learning Beyond Gradients: Distributing Evolutionary Search

Rachid Guerraoui, Andrei Kucharavy, Matteo Monti

Modern machine learning (ML) models are capable of impressive performances. However, their prowess is not due only to the improvements in their architecture and training algorithms but also to a drastic increase in computational power used to train them.|S ...

Assoc Computing Machinery2023

Impact of Redundancy on Resilience in Distributed Optimization and Learning

Nirupam Gupta, Shuo Liu

This paper considers the problem of resilient distributed optimization and stochastic learning in a server-based architecture. The system comprises a server and multiple agents, where each agent has its own local cost function. The agents collaborate with ...

Assoc Computing Machinery2023

Reliable Microsecond-Scale Distributed Computing

Athanasios Xygkis

The landscape of computing is changing, thanks to the advent of modern networking equipment that allows machines to exchange information in as little as one microsecond. Such advancement has enabled microsecond-scale distributed computing, where entire dis ...

EPFL2023