TADA: A Toolkit for Approximate Distributed Agreement

Abstract

TADA is a unique toolkit designed to foster the use and implementation of approximate distributed agreement primitives. Developed in Java, TADA provides ready-to-use implementations of several approximate agreement algorithms, as well as the tools to enable programmers/researchers to easily implement further protocols: A template that enables new protocol implementations to be created by simply changing specific functions; and high-level abstractions for communication and concurrency control. As an example, the toolkit includes a ready-to-use implementation for clock synchronisation between distributed processes. Further use cases can include sensor input stabilisation and distributed machine learning, or other instances of distributed agreement where network synchrony cannot be assumed, byzantine fault tolerance may be required and a bounded divergence in decision values can be tolerated.