More substantial README.

Author: Iulian Moraru

README.md

@@ -1,6 +1,29 @@
-epaxos
+EPaxos
 ======
 
+
+### What is EPaxos?
+
+
+EPaxos is an efficient, leaderless replication protocol. The name stands for *Egalitarian Paxos* -- EPaxos is based
+on the Paxos consensus algorithm. As such, it can tolerate up to F concurrent replica failures with 2F+1 total replicas.
+
+### How does EPaxos differ from Paxos and other Paxos variants?
+
+To function effectively as a replication protocol, Paxos has to rely on a stable leader replica (this optimization is known as Multi-Paxos). The leader can become a bottleneck for performance: it has to handle more messages than the other replicas, and remote clients have to contact the leader, thus experiencing higher latency. Other Paxos variants either also rely on a stable leader, or have a pre-established scheme that allows different replicas to take turns in proposing commands (such as Mencius). The latter scheme
+suffers from tight coupling of the performance of the system from that of every replica -- i.e., the system runs at the speed of the slowest replica.
+
+EPaxos is an efficient, leaderless protocol. It provides **strong consistency with optimal wide-area latency, perfect load-balancing across replicas (both in the local and the wide area), and constant availability for up to F failure**. EPaxos also decouples the performance of the slowest replicas from that of the fastest, so it can better tolerate slow replicas than previous protocols.
+
+### How does EPaxos work?
+
+We have [an SOSP 2013 paper](http://dl.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=2517350&ftid=1403953&dwn=1) that describes EPaxos in detail.
+
+A simpler, more straightforward explanation is coming here soon.
+
+
+### What is in this repository?
+
 This repository contains the Go implementations of:
 
 * Egalitarian Paxos (EPaxos), a new distributed consensus algorithm based on