Interactive Simulation of Distributed Systems

A set of building blocks for explaining distributed systems concepts in an interactive way. Also a few websites that use these building blocks, most prominently our Layers of Bitcoin.

Want to embed a cool interactive distributed system thingy on your website? Here is an idea. You can build your own!

Everything here is currently geared towards simulating and visualizing Bitcoin-like systems, but the underlying simulation framework and interaction components were built with more general goals in mind. The core framework (in isds) can be extended to also simulate and visualize PBFT-like consensus protocols, DHTs, onion routing and maybe even something like TCP congestion control. Maybe someday it even will be extended in some of these ways...

Getting started

1. Make sure you have some basic tools installed:

   • Rust
   • trunk
     • Install (one of several options): cargo install trunk

2. Choose a website to build from the sites directory; cd into its directory.

3. Run: trunk serve

4. Open localhost:8080 in a browser.

5. Hack around.

Note: trunk serve builds without optimizations; it you want performance you should use trunk build --release instead.

Running tests

If your website has unit tests, you can instruct trunk to run them on each build. See the supplied Trunk.toml files.

For testing isds and its components, you need to (for now) manually run wasm-pack test from the isds directory. For example:

wasm-pack test --headless --firefox

You can automate the running of tests on file changes using cargo watch:

cargo watch -- wasm-pack test --headless --firefox

Deploy

1. Run trunk build --release --public-url URL where URL is the URL at which you plan to serve the site (can also be a relative URL like "/isds/"; defaults to "/").
2. The contents of the dist folder are the website; copy them to where you want the site to be hosted at.