Towards a Library of Distributed Algorithms and Animations (Lydian)

As distributed algorithms may involve a large amount of data describing local state information and complex interactions between elements, it is often very di cult to achieve an understanding of their control ow (and performance behaviour) only from a pseudo-code description or from data streams (e.g. execution traces). This paper is on our project which constitutes a systematic e ort to explore the use of visualisation and animation aids to illuminate the key ideas of distributed protocols and algorithms. In particular, it involves: