New Subnet Creation

This Page is Still Work in Progress

Ever wondered about the meaning behind DFINITY? It’s Decentralized + Infinity. It’s named that way because the Internet Computer is designed to scale infinitely. It means that the Internet Computer can host an unlimited number of canisters (smart contracts), store an unlimited amount of memory, process an unlimited amount of transactions per second. In simple words, Internet Computer is designed to host even large scale social media platforms in a fully decentralized way.

There are two types of widely-used approaches to improve the scalability of a system. (1) Vertical Scaling, and (2) Horizontal Scaling. Vertical scaling means adding more CPU, RAM and disk to a single computer. Horizontal scaling means adding more computers to the system. There is a limit to vertical scaling. But with horizontal scaling, one can achieve unlimited scalability. Internet Computer is one of the first blockchains to successfully use horizontal scaling.

The nodes in the Internet Computer are divided into subnets, each containing a few dozen nodes. The set of nodes in a subnet together maintain one blockchain. Each subnet can host a few thousand canisters and process messages received by those canisters. Each subnet has a limited capacity in terms of the number of canisters (a few thousand), amount of storage (a few TB), and bandwidth (a few hundred transactions per second). But as more subnets are added to the Internet Computer, its overall capacity increases proportionately. There is no limit on the number of subnets that can be added, resulting in unlimited scalability.

Creating a new subnet has two steps.

• Add new nodes to the Internet Computer
• Create a subnet with the unassigned nodes

Adding new nodes

We new describe a series of steps that need to be followed to add a new node to the Internet Computer.

• Node provider purchases node hardware with the recommended specifications.
• Node provider purchases a NitroKey (a Hardware Security Module), generates a public-key/secret-key pair, and submits an NNS proposal to add his public key to the NNS registry. The community votes on the proposal. If the majority accept the proposal, then the node provider's credentials are added to the NNS registry. From now on, the NNS canisters trust the messages signed by the node provider's secret key. The entire process is specified in the node provider onboarding article.
• The node doesn't yet have any operating system. The node provider needs to install the IC-OS operating system on the node. The detailed procedure can be found in IC-OS installation runbook articles ([1], [2]).