Bachelor/Master Thesis

Performance Evaluation of CometBFT

CometBFT [1] is a mature and widely used [2] byzantine-fault-tolerant replicated state machine, built on top of the Tendermint [3] consensus protocol. Its modular design allows easy integration with a custom distributed application.

Despite its wide-spread use, there is little [4] work reproducibly studying its performance characteristics. The goal of this thesis is to implement a reproducible, meaningful, benchmark of CometBFT. One way to do so would be to integrate it into Diablo [5, 6], a benchmarking framework aiming to allow a fair comparison of different blockchain software’s performance. Alternatively a custom benchmark could be written using lower-level, CometBFT-specific, tools. [7]

A basic understanding of distributed applications, networking, and system administration, are beneficial. Students will have to familiarize themselves with an existing codebase written in the Go language.

References

[1] CometBFT Website

[2] Cosmos Network

[3] The latest gossip on BFT consensus

[4] On the performance of distributed ledgers for the Internet of Things

[5] Diablo: A Benchmark Suite for Blockchains

[6] Stabl: The Sensitivity of Blockchains to Failures

[7] CometBFT Load Testing Framework

Contact Michael Senn for more information.

Nature of the project: Systems 80%, Theory 20%.