Stefan Kaestle
DFINITY, Zurich, Switzerland
About me Publications DFINITY Foundation Oracle labs ETH Zurich IBM Smarthome Shoal Smelt Machine Learning

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DFINITY Foundation

During my time at the DFINITY Foundation, the Internet Computer has evolved from a startup to a full fledged operational system.

Consequently, I have been involved in various aspects of the design and implementation.

The Internet Computer is open-source. Consequently, my work on the IC is visible on github

My contributions to the IC on GitHub

My most notable work is:

Performance and scalability

One of my main responsibilities at DFINITY was to drive work on performance analysis of the IC, including the design and development of a workload generator tool to issue requests against the IC evenly at high request rates. Further developed a tool to issue mixed workload from multiple load generator machines and acquire detailed OS and hardware metrics of the IC's performance throughout those experiments.

Protocol Upgrades

I was helping design and leading development of Internet Computer protocol upgrades. Challenges have been that although the IC is a distributed and decentralized system, upgrades have to be applied at the same logical time on all nodes. Those nodes don't have a global time and might hence be arbitrarily far behind. They might also be malicious.

In contracts to other blockchains, our upgrade mechanism allows for arbitrary changes in the Internet Computer Protocol, including changes to the Consensus protocol. All canister state is preserved and the user-perceived downtime from upgrades is low.

Rollout to IC node machines is autonomous based on votes in the governance system, so that no single entity has the power to unilaterally apply such an upgrade.

Runtime layer

I am one out of two researchers in the runtime team.

The runtime team's mission is to enable secure and efficient execution of arbitrary Wasm code (smart contracts).

I was leading design and implementation of multiple features as part of the runtime team.