sandreim: promote to rank III

evidence/sandreim/0003-sandreim-evidence-2024.md

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+# Evidence-0003: Promotion to Rank III
+
+| | |
+| --------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
+| **Report Date** | 2024/11/29 |
+| **Submitted by**| Andrei Sandu |
+
+## Member details
+
+- Matrix username: @sandreim:parity.io
+- Polkadot address: 13QdJvnJgfoitjrxESwrCWTaLMN8KvXxufDUucXM6EWGuxqh
+- Current rank: 2
+- Date of initial induction: 2023/07/18
+- Date of last report: N/A
+- Area(s) of Expertise/Interest: Parachain Consensus, Node Performance Engineering, Observability,
+Stress and integration testing
+
+## Reporting period
+
+- Start date: 2023/07/18
+- End date: 2024/11/29
+
+## Evidence
+
+During the reporting period, I have played an important role in the design, development, and
+deployment of a few major projects to Polkadot that had a significant impact:
+
+- better decentralization and security by increasing parachain validators from 200 to 500
+- more blockspace by increasing the number of usable cores to 100
+- lowering the latency and increasing the maximum throughput of parachains with Elastic Scaling
+- faster and lower cost parachain consensus protocol performance engineering with Subsystem Benchmarks
+
+I've been an active participant in OpenDev calls and in the
+[Polkadot forum](https://forum.polkadot.network/u/sandreim/activity), consistently giving updates
+on the progress of the implementation, testing, and deployment of Elastic Scaling.
+
+I consider that this evidence, detailed in the next section, is aligned both in quality and
+quantity with the Fellowship for a rank 3 promotion.
+
+### Increasing number of validators and cores
+
+I started working on this project before being inducted into the fellowship.
+That work consisted of load testing, benchmarking, and research to find parachain consensus
+protocol and implementation bottlenecks on the node and runtime implementation. At the time
+Polkadot had 200 validators and 40 cores.  I created the
+[scalability roadmap](https://github.com/paritytech/roadmap/issues/26) which includes
+multiple changes and ideas I contributed as improvements in major parachain consensus protocols:
+availability, approval voting, and the overall node-side subsystem architecture.
+
+Major design and code contributions:
+
+- **[Assignment certificates v2](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/1178)**:
+This is an enhancement of the approval voting protocol aimed at reducing the usage
+of network/CPU resources by a factor of up to 6 in perfect network conditions.
+
+- **[Approval voting subsystem re-write](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/issues/1617)**:
+Proposal of a simpler and scalable subsystem architecture. The two existing approval voting
+subsystems are merged into a single one. The new subsystem introduces message processing parallelism
+to make use of more CPU resources to handle the load at a scale of 1000 validators and
+500 cores.
+
+I've communicated with the ecosystem about scaling up plans in forum posts and Element chats:
+[Kusama](https://forum.polkadot.network/t/update-parachain-validator-set-size-increase-on-kusama/8218),
+[Polkadot](https://forum.polkadot.network/t/update-polkadot-validator-set-size-increase/8682)
+
+### Parachain consensus performance benchmarks
+
+My main motivation for building this was to replace the old ways of doing load testing by
+running large networks. It was expensive and slow, producing huge amounts of data
+that were very hard to analyze and reason about. The output of my work is a
+[new tool](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/tree/master/polkadot/node/subsystem-bench)
+which is required for the continuous improvement of the scalability and resilience of the parachain
+consensus protocols and Polkadot.
+
+I designed and implemented [multiple modular components](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/tree/master/polkadot/node/subsystem-bench#reusable-test-components) that are used to emulate the network
+traffic and load found in large-scale networks on local development machines. It performs stress
+tests of one or more parachain consensus subsystems without running a network. It collects granular
+CPU usage and network metrics and is an integral part of ongoing scalability and performance
+optimization development and CI performance regression testing.
+
+**Subsytem benchmarks PRs**: [1](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/2528), [2](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/2970)
+
+### Elastic scaling (MVP)
+
+I played a major role in the design, development, and testing of the first iteration (MVP) of
+Elastic Scaling, which was deployed to Kusama and currently allows parachains to
+use up to 3 cores per relay chain block. I had several significant contributions to bootstrap
+the node side and runtime implementation:
+
+- [Introduce an assumed core index](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/3229)
+- [Runtime changes for backing multiple candidates ](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/3231)
+- [Benchbuilder improvements for elastic scaling](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/3573)
+- [Collator protocol support](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/3795)
+- [Statement distribution support](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/3879)
+
+### Elastic scaling (RFC103)
+
+Played a primary role in initial design work: [Github](https://github.com/polkadot-fellows/RFCs/issues/92)
+
+Authored [RFC 103](https://github.com/polkadot-fellows/RFCs/blob/main/text/0103-introduce-core-index-commitment.md)
+and led the [planning](https://github.com/orgs/paritytech/projects/119/views/25) and
+implementation in multiple parachain consensus protocol components.
+
+Significant code contributions in both runtime and node side:
+
+- [Introduce the new Polkadot primitives](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/issues/5044)
+- [Node feature sanity checks](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/5362)
+- [Full Runtime implementation](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/5423)
+- [Bootstrap node implementation](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/5679).
+- [Candidate Validation](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/5847)
+- [Statement Distribution](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/5883)
+
+## Voting record
+
+|  Ranks | Activity thresholds | Agreement thresholds | Member's voting activities | Comments |
+|---|---|---|---|---|
+|I  |90%   |N/A   |   |  |
+|II |80%   |N/A   | I have voted on 4 out of 20 referenda in which I was eligible to vote (20% voting activity) ||
+|III|70%   |100%  |   |  |
+|IV |60%   |90%   |   |  |
+|V  |50%   |80%   |   |  |
+|VI |40%   |70%   |   |  |