Substracer - an open-source Substrate network simulator

[chungquantin]

Substracer - Interactive Substrate Simulator

Description

Simulate the substrate network in an interactive graphical interface.

• Run a virtual Substrate node directly on the browser
• Configure pallets and chain specification interactively
• Tracing the peer-to-peer network behavior

Motivation

One of the biggest obstacles to diving deeper into the Polkadot blockchain is the limitation of hardware requirements and lack of interactive approaches. The learning curve is huge to start with the Polkadot core technologies and requires much time to read the documentation. Inspired by this thread on Polkadot forum, there is no unified approach for DevRel to widespread the value of the whole Polkadot ecosystem.

Hence, we feel like the community needs a more creative solution to the stated problem. With experience in traditional networking software, the Cisco Packet Tracker is a tool hugely inspires the birth of the Substrate Simulator.

Development Milestone

🔴 Version 0.0.1

To deliver the first version of the product, we must customize the runtime (/runtime) so it can communicate with the web server (/server) and pass data accross services. Hence, we can simulate the behaviour of the production runtime by using the web server as the networking and computation layer.

• Drag and drop editor to add Substrate node
• Add / edit chain specification directly on browser
• Simulate the behaviors of Substrate node

Running a new node will store node in the EdgeDB database with ability to configure chain specification and authority on the client side. Node will be run at the virtual port simulated in the simulation environment.

• Simulate node discovery mechanism

This feature allows a visualization of the request transmitting in the network to break down the mechanism of Substrate's node discovery.