Assess students' ability to analyze and compare Paxos, Raft, and PBFT in geo‑distributed, partially synchronous systems. Tasks: (1) state safety and liveness under crash vs. Byzantine faults; (2) derive and compare latency (rounds, dependency on network delay) and throughput bounds (quorum sizes, communication complexity); (3) evaluate behavior under partitions, variable latency, and adversarial Byzantine actions; and (4) justify protocol selection and propose mitigations or optimizations for specified deployment constraints and metrics.