About

The Distributed Systems and Ledgers Lab is located at the OST Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland.

We focus on applied research with the newest technology, innovative design and strong engineering in all aspects of distributed systems, including blockchains. We recognize the importance of open communication between industry, institutions, start-ups, and students.

The DSL lab is striving to expand the frontier of innovation in this field by fostering productive discussion and collaboration, supplemented with ground-breaking applied scientific progress.

The DSL Lab works on several open source projects, notably, Bazo, TomP2P, and ICOnator.

Bazo is a permissionless blockchain to test and evaluate mechanisms such as proof-of-stake or sharding. Bazo is a research blockchain with the main goal of testing new algorithms and mechanisms.
TomP2P is a peer-to-peer library that implements a DHT and offers other features as well. The latest version is fully encrypted and can traverse NATs and firewalls.
ICOnator is an easy, secure, configurable, and scalable open source ICO engine. It is a Spring Boot application that uses message queues for scalability.

News

Challenge Task Winner Distributed Systems FS24

(03.06.2024) Congratulations 🎉 to the FS24 challenge task winner of the Distributed Systems lecture at the Ostschweizer Fachhochschule. In this semester, 22 groups participated in this challenge, with the requirement to design, build an implement, and scalable decentralized system. And the winning group is: Alice Glaus, Mischa Binder, and Nils-Robin Grob. with Co-Puzzle Web App, which is a collaborative puzzle using websockets, deployed interally at OST: https://dsys-puzzle.network.garden. For the load balancer they used Traefik, everything dockerized of course, for the frontend/backend they used React with next, and for the database, they used MongoDB. Congratulations, very impressive work!

Challenge Task Winner Blockchain HS23

(18.12.2023) Congratulations 🎉 to the HS23 challenge task winner of the Blockchain lecture at the Ostschweizer Fachhochschule. In this semester, 13 groups participated in this challenge. The winning group is: Manuel Metzler, Reto Furrer, and Sascha Häring (2nd time in a row!). Manuel, Reto, and Sascha implemented a dual deposit system that has a mutually assured destruction mechanism that discourages fraudulent activity from both buyers and sellers. For the backend they used Golang, in the frontend they used Rust that was compiled to WebAssembly. For the blockchain environment they used ICP where canisters (~smart contracts) were written in Motoko. Very impressive work!

Challenge Task Winner Distributed Systems FS23

(06.06.2023) Congratulations 🎉 to the FS23 challenge task winner of the Distributed Systems lecture at the Ostschweizer Fachhochschule. In this semester, 28 groups participated in this challenge, with the requirement to design, build an implement, and scalable decentralized system. And the winning group is: Manuel Metzler, Reto Furrer, and Sascha Häring. Their web application, designed to share collections of pictures, featured automated tagging through PhotoPrism. For storage, they used ScyllaDB, a high-performance, fault-tolerant database compatible with Cassandra. Everything is self-hosted with their own Kubernetes cluster using MetalLB.

Services and Partners

Working together with institutions, companies, and start-ups, we provide the following services. For further information, please contact me!

How to reach us

Address

Dr. Thomas Bocek
Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences
Oberseestrasse 10, CH-8640 Rapperswil, Switzerland

By Car

The nearest public car park is around ten minutes (walking distance) away. There is a local parking guidance system in place. There are only a few, paid parking spaces available close to the university with a maximum parking duration of 2 hours. The OST parking garage can only be used by OST members, from Monday to Friday, 6:00 to 17:00.

By Train

The Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences in Rapperswil is located next to the train station in Rapperswil. Rapperswil has a direct connection to Zurich with the S15, S5, and S7.

Rapperswil