Paxi

Paxi or Paxoi (Greek: Παξοί, pronounced /pækˈsiː/ in English and [pɐkˈsi] in Greek) is the smallest group of Ionian Islands (the Heptanese). In Greek it is a plural form. The largest islands are Paxos and nearby Antipaxos. Antipaxos is famous for its wine and two of the finest sand beaches in the Ionian Sea. The main town of Paxoi, and the seat of the municipality, is Gaios. In Greek mythology, Poseidon created the island by striking Corfu with his trident, so that he and wife Amphitrite could have some peace and quiet.

History

Although it was possibly inhabited from prehistoric times, the Phoenicians are traditionally held to have been the first settlers on Paxos. The name is believed to be derived from Pax, which meant trapezoidal in their language.

This island is noted for the Battle of Paxi, fought between the ancient Greek and Illyrian fleets during the First Illyrian War in 229 BC. The battle is recorded by the ancient historian Polybius (The Histories, book 2, chapter 2).

The Romans ruled the island from the 2nd century BC, and during the Byzantine period and Middle Ages it was constantly attacked by pirates. After various rulers and Crusaders had passed through, the island was taken by the Venetians at the end of the 14th century.

Paxos (computer science)

Paxos is a family of protocols for solving consensus in a network of unreliable processors. Consensus is the process of agreeing on one result among a group of participants. This problem becomes difficult when the participants or their communication medium may experience failures.

Consensus protocols are the basis for the state machine replication approach to distributed computing, as suggested by Leslie Lamport and surveyed by Fred B. Schneider.State machine replication is a technique for converting an algorithm into a fault-tolerant, distributed implementation. Ad-hoc techniques may leave important cases of failures unresolved. The principled approach proposed by Lamport et al. ensures all cases are handled safely.

The Paxos protocol was first published in 1989 and named after a fictional legislative consensus system used on the Paxos island in Greece. It was later published as a journal article in 1998.

The Paxos family of protocols includes a spectrum of trade-offs between the number of processors, number of message delays before learning the agreed value, the activity level of individual participants, number of messages sent, and types of failures. Although no deterministic fault-tolerant consensus protocol can guarantee progress in an asynchronous network (a result proven in a paper by Fischer, Lynch and Paterson), Paxos guarantees safety (consistency), and the conditions that could prevent it from making progress are difficult to provoke.

Paxos (disambiguation)

Paxos may refer to: