Glossary
Turbine
Solana's block propagation protocol — shards each block into small packets and forwards them through a tree of validators to keep bandwidth bounded per node.
Turbine is Solana's solution to the bandwidth problem in fast high-throughput consensus. The leader's block is split into "shreds" (small UDP packets, ~1.2 KB each, with erasure-coded redundancy). Each validator forwards a fraction of the shreds it receives to a small set of downstream validators in a deterministic tree.
The model means no single validator needs to broadcast the full block to the whole network — bandwidth scales O(log N) with the validator count rather than O(N). Turbine is essential to keeping Solana's 400ms block time achievable on commodity hardware.