Visualizing BFT SMR Distributed Systems - Example of BFT-SMaRt

Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) State Machine Replication (SMR) distributed systems are very complex systems whose optimization traditionally relies on the analysis of log files or the output of debugging processes. In this work in progress, we use visualization techniques to support human users in the task of analyzing, understand, and optimizing a BFT SMR distributed system in both online and offline modes. The visualization of the execution of BFT SMR distributed systems features with the possibility to correlate information from different levels of abstraction. Our design methodologies also allow us to address the different challenges accompanying the visualization of distributed systems in general. We illustrate our study with an example usage scenario in which the execution of a BFT-SMaRt-based distributed system is visualized.