What I worked on
The simulation research internship during the summer of 2018 led to the creation of the Hyperledger Umbra Lab. Due to the overall difficulty of getting Hyperledger blockchain frameworks running under the Shadow simulation tool, work on the Umbra lab had slowed to a crawl. A different network (si)emulation tool called Mininet had been proposed as an alternative to using Shadow with the potential to drastically reduce the startup cost of getting a network simulation tool running Hyperledger blockchains. My research project was to test the feasibility of running Hyperledger blockchains under Mininet for the purposes of running scalability and consensus mechanism experiments.
Project Objectives:
- Build reference architecture (Logical View and Process View)
- Evaluate Fabric project with reference architecture
- Build Stimulus, Monitoring, Dynamics
- Build Analysis
- Extend architecture to other Hyperledger project(s)
- Document the project
What I accomplished
By the end of my project, I had completed the design of a generic event-oriented platform that can be modularly extended to reproduce any Hyperledger blockchain platform. The main difficulty was getting a clear understanding of working with Fabric as integration with this tool was not well documented. The documentation, especially,for how to create an example of extending Umbra for another blockchain project, is still going on.
Project Deliverables:
- Generic platform for running Hyperledger blockchain platforms
- Reproducible Ad-hoc Hyperledger Fabric Network (main achievement)
- Reproducible Ad-hoc Hyperledger Iroha Network (almost finished)
- Documentation (ongoing)
- Accepted for Hyperledger Global Forum 2020
What comes next
This is the beginning of reproducible academic work on Hyperledger blockchain projects (i.e., the development of comparable methodologies for consensus, gossip, security, etc.). Now, the most interesting work is running Umbra at scale as a cloud with hundreds/thousands of blockchain nodes.
For more details, please see my complete project report here.
Many Thanks to the Hyperledger MentorshipCommunity!
#umbra via labs@lists.hyperledger.org
https://github.com/hyperledger-labs/umbra
Raphael Vicente Rosa
https://intrig.dca.fee.unicamp.br/raphaelvrosa/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/raphaelvrosa