Evidence-0001: Retention at Rank I

Member details

• Matrix username: @alexggh:parity.io
• Polkadot address: 14uA7Vc828e2Q6oL5GBHP9UzTkEvwqbroERwRmucGrLmPuuL
• Current rank: 1
• Date of initial induction: 2024/07/20
• Date of last report: N/A
• Area(s) of Expertise/Interest: Parachains consensus

Reporting period

• Start date: 2024/07/20
• End date: 2024/10/21

Evidence

During the reporting I was mostly focused on the scalability and stability of the Polkadot network.

On the scalability side, the end goal is expanding the number of validators and cores to 1000 validators and 200 cores. To achieve that I've been directly involved in the following work streams:

• Optimize and parallelize approval-voting subsystems. Approval voting protocol is one of the system that scales linearly with the number of validators and cores, on top of that it needs to be fast in processing its messages, because every 500ms validators trigger new work if they did not gathered enough assignments from their peers. To that end a major rearchitecting of these subsytems was done to make sure we parallelize the processing and optimize the hot paths, the implementation was delivered with 4849, 4848 4928, 5411.
• Increase the validators hardware specifications, this analysis showed us the recommended 4 cores for validators won't be enough if we want to scale up the network size and usage, so I've worked on the necessary steps to make sure the network agrees and that validators are informed if the their current hardware configuration is inline with the new recommended specification.
• Created plan for gradually reaching 1000 validators on polkadot, I gathered the necessary dependencies needed for reaching 1000 validators and 200 cores on polkadot into a checklist that needs to be followed step by step and started taking the necessary steps. E.g: Going from 400 to 500 validators on polkadot.

On the stability side, I've been doing the following things:

• Extend our tooling, by implementing a whois cli to help with debugging issues on live networks, PR794.
• I've been actively involved in debugging live issues on the main polkadot network E.g: Parachain/Finality stalls & Constant high finality
• Monitor production networks and validators channels and provide support when I can e.g: Evidence1, Evidence2, Evidence3
• Provided Polkadot reviews in the areas and domains I'm familiar with.

Voting record