BAASH: Enabling Blockchain-as-a-Service on High-Performance Computing Systems
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The state-of-the-art approach to manage blockchains is to process blocks of transactions in a shared-nothing environment. Although blockchains have the potential to provide various services for high-performance computing (HPC) systems, HPC will not be able to embrace blockchains before the following two missing pieces become available: (i) new consensus protocols being aware of the shared-storage architecture in HPC, and (ii) new fault-tolerant mechanisms compensating for HPC's programming model—the message passing interface (MPI)—that is vulnerable for blockchain-like workloads. To this end, we design a new set of consensus protocols crafted for the HPC platforms and a new fault-tolerance subsystem compensating for the failures caused by faulty MPI processes. Built on top of the new protocols and fault-tolerance mechanism, a prototype system is implemented and evaluated with two million transactions on a 500-core HPC cluster, showing 6×, 12×, and 75× higher throughput than Hyperldeger, Ethereum, and Parity, respectively.
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