Parachain Consensus Updates: Coretime, asynchronous backing, scalability

Ecosystem
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Here are the instructions:

In order to try out on demand parachains on Rococo, first make sure you’ve grabbed some ROC from the testnet faucet https://paritytech.github.io/polkadot-testnet-faucet.

If you have a runtime on hand you can register it on a new ParaId and onboard it as a Parathread just like usual but do not request a parachain slot. After onboarding, starting a collator and syncing you can go straight on to the placing an order section.

If you don’t have a runtime ready but would like to try it anyway, you can read up on the setup for the adder collator section at the end of this post to get started with a ready to go runtime.

Placing an order

In Polkadot.js:

  1. Navigate to Developer → Extrinsics.
  2. Select onDemandAssignmentProvider from the “submit the following extrinsic” field.
  3. Choose either placeOrderAllowDeath or placeOrderKeepAlive extrinsic.
  4. The maxAmount field must be somewhere between 10_000_000 and the maximum you would be willing to pay for a single on demand block. The paraId field should be set to the ParaId you registered and onboarded.
    place-order-extrinsic
    place-order-extrinsic854×593 46.7 KB

If the extrinsic was accepted and the collator is working, a new parachain block should be included within a few relay chain blocks depending on congestion.

In the case of an adder-collator runtime, the block head will increase by 1 for each block added.

updated-adder-head
updated-adder-head746×59 3.42 KB

Looking up on demand price and other data

  • The price of an on demand block is calculated by multiplying configuration.on_demand_base_fee with SpotTraffic, which is the output of a price controller.

  • The base fee and parameters to the price controller are all exposed to governance. Most of these parameters can be located in the configuration pallet under on_demand_*.

  • The actual fee charged for an order is found in the SpotOrderPlaced event which is emitted on every placed order.

  • The number of on demand parachains that can be processed in the same relay chain block is determined by the configuration.on_demand_cores value.

  • A parachain cannot have parallel blocks on 2 or more different cores on the same relay chain block. Multiple orders for the same parachain will be processed sequentially.

  • The onDemandAssignmentProvider pallet stores the order queue under onDemandQueue and the spot traffic multiplier can be found under spotTraffic.

  • The lowest amount that maxAmount can be set as is determined by configuration.on_demand.base_fee, which by default is 10_000_000.

Setup for the adder collator

The following instructions will go through the steps needed to get an instance of adder-collator up and running on Rococo as an on-demand parachain.

Compile the adder-collator:

# In the polkadot-sdk repository
cargo build -r -p test-parachain-adder-collator

Export the genesis state for the adder-collator:

# Still in the polkadot-sdk repository
./target/release/adder-collator export-genesis-state \
  --chain=rococo \
  $SOME_PATH/rococo-adder-genesis-state

In Polkadot.js:

  1. Register a new ParaId: Network → Parachains → Parathreads → ParaId. Note down the ParaId.
  2. On the same page, register a ParaThread. The ParaId should be the one used in step 1. The code is obtained from ./target/release/wbuild/test-parachain-adder/test_parachain_adder.compact.compressed.wasm and the initial_state is obtained from $SOME_PATH/rococo-adder-genesis-state that was generated earlier.

While waiting for onboarding to finish, launch the collator to start syncing with Rococo.

# You guessed it, polkadot-sdk repository
./target/release/adder-collator \
  --parachain-id=$YOUR_PARA_ID \
  --chain=rococo

If you don’t have a backup available on hand, this might take a while (a couple of days in my experience).

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