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by chubot 2970 days ago
This talk was about Foundation DB was brought up recently, and it's pretty amazing. I recommend watching the whole thing, but to be brief they are taming the "infinite interleavings" problem through determinism.

"Testing Distributed Systems w/ Deterministic Simulation" by Will Wilson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fFDFbi3toc

They wrote an interesting Actor DSL that compiles to C++ and is completely deterministic, and they torture this deterministic engine with generated test cases on a cluster every night.

I guess you could say that the whole cluster is necessarily non-deterministic, but an individual node is deterministic, given an ordering of the messages it receives.