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arXiv · 2104.06968

Blockchain Machine: A Network-Attached Hardware Accelerator for Hyperledger Fabric

Abstract

In this paper, we demonstrate how Hyperledger Fabric, one of the most popular permissioned blockchains, can benefit from network-attached acceleration. The scalability and peak performance of Fabric is primarily limited by the bottlenecks present in its block validation/commit phase. We propose Blockchain Machine, a hardware accelerator coupled with a hardware-friendly communication protocol, to act as the validator peer. It can be adapted to applications and their smart contracts, and is targeted for a server with network-attached FPGA acceleration card. The Blockchain Machine retrieves blocks and their transactions in hardware directly from the network interface, which are then validated through a configurable and efficient block-level and transaction-level pipeline. The validation results are then transferred to the host CPU where non-bottleneck operations are executed. From our implementation integrated with Fabric v1.4 LTS, we observed up to 12x speedup in block validation when compared to software-only validator peer, with commit throughput of up to 68,900 tps. Our work provides an acceleration platform that will foster further research on hardware acceleration of permissioned blockchains.

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Haris Javaid, Ji Yang, Nathania Santoso, Mohit Upadhyay, Sundararajarao Mohan, Chengchen Hu, Gordon Brebner. 2021-04-14. Blockchain Machine: A Network-Attached Hardware Accelerator for Hyperledger Fabric. https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.06968

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