Block-STM: Scaling Blockchain Execution by Turning Ordering Curse to a Performance Blessing
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Block-STM is a parallel execution engine for smart contracts, built around the principles of Software Transactional Memory. Transactions are grouped in blocks, and every execution of the block must yield the same deterministic outcome. Block-STM further enforces that the outcome is consistent with executing transactions according to a preset order, leveraging this order to dynamically detect dependencies and avoid conflicts during speculative transaction execution. At the core of Block-STM is a novel, low-overhead collaborative scheduler of execution and validation tasks. Block-STM is implemented on the main branch of the Diem Blockchain code-base. The evaluation demonstrates that Block-STM is adaptive to workloads with different conflict rates and utilizes the inherent parallelism therein. Block-STM achieves up to 140k tps in the benchmarks, which is a 20x improvement over the sequential baseline with 32 threads. The throughput on a contended workload is up to 60k tps.
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