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Basic Overview

ShardEval is a sharding-based blockchain simulator. It can be used to simulate protocols for the sharding-based Blockchain systems. ShardEval is built on the top of BlockEval.

The complete design and theoretical analysis can be found on Springer, accepted by 19th International Conference on Information and Systems Security (ICISS).

Following is a brief representation of the simulator workflow for sharded systems:

Setup

cd ShardEval
pip install -r requirements.txt
bash setup.sh

Usage

The command-line interface for the doc-phi can be used as:

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\ \| '_ \ / _` | '__/ _` |/_\ \ \ / / _` | |
_\ \ | | | (_| | | | (_| //__  \ V / (_| | |
\__/_| |_|\__,_|_|  \__,_\__/   \_/ \__,_|_|

Usage: shard-eval [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

Options:
  --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  analyze-log           Analyze the generated log files
  batch-run-simulation  Initiate simulations in batches
  execute-simulator     execute simulator completely
  run-simulation        Initiate a simulation
  summarize-logs        Summarize the generated log files
  visualize-file        visualize the generated log files

A more elaborate explanation is as follows:

1. Running Simulation

The simulation can be executed by:

shard-eval run-simulation

The simulation executes as per the parameters specified in the config/params.json file. The result of the simulation are the log files which are stored accordingly in the folder simulation_logs.

Note: To generate detailed logs, set verbose to 1 in the params.json file.

2. Running Simulation in Batch

The simulation can be executed in batch by using following command:

shard-eval batch-run-simulation

The script.py file needs to be changed accordingly to generate the logs as per the required parameters.

3. Analyzing the logs

The generated log files can be analyzed by:

shard-eval analyze-log --log_file=<log_file>

Upon execution, several files (html, txt, csv, png) will be created in respective folders inside the logs_data which will contain a detailed analysis of the log file.

4. Summarizing the logs (in batch)

To create a summary of the logs, following command can be used:

shard-eval summarize-logs --log_dir=<logs_directory>

A single csv file containing the summary of all the logs will be generated.

5. Visualizing the summary of the logs

After creating the summary, the csv file can be visualized using:

shard-eval visualize-file --summary_file=<summary_file>

Several plots will be created inside the suitable directories under the logs_data directory.

6. End-to-end execution of the simulator

To execute the simulator completely and perform all the steps in an instant, following command can be useful:

shard-eval execute-simulator

Citations

If you use this simulator in your research, please cite:

@InProceedings{10.1007/978-3-031-49099-6_21,
  author = "Priyadarshi, Vishisht and Goel, Sourav and Kapoor, Kalpesh",
  title = "Analysis of Optimal Number of Shards Using ShardEval, A Simulator for Sharded Blockchains",
  booktitle = "Information Systems Security",
  year = "2023",
  publisher = "Springer Nature Switzerland"
}