research-article

Utilizing parallelism in smart contracts on decentralized blockchains by taming application-inherent conflicts

Authors:

Péter Garamvölgyi,

Ming WuAuthors Info & Claims

ICSE '22: Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering

Pages 2315 - 2326

https://doi.org/10.1145/3510003.3510086

Published: 05 July 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Traditional public blockchain systems typically had very limited transaction throughput because of the bottleneck of the consensus protocol itself. With recent advances in consensus technology, the performance limit has been greatly lifted, typically to thousands of transactions per second. With this, transaction execution has become a new performance bottleneck. Exploiting parallelism in transaction execution is a clear and direct way to address this and to further increase transaction throughput. Although some recent literature introduced concurrency control mechanisms to execute smart contract transactions in parallel, the reported speedup that they can achieve is far from ideal. The main reason is that the proposed parallel execution mechanisms cannot effectively deal with the conflicts inherent in many blockchain applications.

In this work, we thoroughly study the historical transaction execution traces in Ethereum. We observe that application-inherent conflicts are the major factors that limit the exploitable parallelism during execution. We propose to use partitioned counters and special commutative instructions to break up the application conflict chains in order to maximize the potential speedup. When we evaluated the maximum parallel speedup achievable, these techniques doubled this limit to an 18x overall speedup compared to serial execution, thus approaching the optimum. We also propose OCC-DA, an optimistic concurrency control scheduler with deterministic aborts, which makes it possible to use OCC scheduling in public blockchain settings.

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Cited By

Chen ZYang TZheng YZhang ZJin CZhou A(2024)Spectrum: Speedy and Strictly-Deterministic Smart Contract Transactions for Blockchain LedgersProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3675034.367504517:10(2541-2554)Online publication date: 6-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.14778/3675034.3675045
Zhang HLi JZhao HZhou TSheng NPan H(2023)BlockPilot: A Proposer-Validator Parallel Execution Framework for BlockchainProceedings of the 52nd International Conference on Parallel Processing10.1145/3605573.3605621(193-202)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3605573.3605621
Giatzis AGeorgiadis CDigkas G(2023)A Comparative Analysis of Ethereum Solidity and Sui Move Smart Contract Languages: Advantages and Trade-Offs2023 6th World Symposium on Communication Engineering (WSCE)10.1109/WSCE59557.2023.10365887(34-38)Online publication date: 27-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/WSCE59557.2023.10365887
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Index Terms

Utilizing parallelism in smart contracts on decentralized blockchains by taming application-inherent conflicts
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Concurrent computing methodologies
  2. Parallel computing methodologies
    1. Parallel algorithms
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties
    1. Extra-functional properties
      1. Software performance

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cover image ACM Conferences

ICSE '22: Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering

May 2022

2508 pages

ISBN:9781450392211

DOI:10.1145/3510003

General Chair:
Matthew B Dwyer
University of Virginia
,
Program Chairs:
Daniela Damian
University of Victoria, Canada
,
Andreas Zeller
CISPA, Germany

Copyright © 2022 ACM.

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Published: 05 July 2022

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May 21 - 29, 2022

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Cited By

Chen ZYang TZheng YZhang ZJin CZhou A(2024)Spectrum: Speedy and Strictly-Deterministic Smart Contract Transactions for Blockchain LedgersProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3675034.367504517:10(2541-2554)Online publication date: 6-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.14778/3675034.3675045
Zhang HLi JZhao HZhou TSheng NPan H(2023)BlockPilot: A Proposer-Validator Parallel Execution Framework for BlockchainProceedings of the 52nd International Conference on Parallel Processing10.1145/3605573.3605621(193-202)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3605573.3605621
Giatzis AGeorgiadis CDigkas G(2023)A Comparative Analysis of Ethereum Solidity and Sui Move Smart Contract Languages: Advantages and Trade-Offs2023 6th World Symposium on Communication Engineering (WSCE)10.1109/WSCE59557.2023.10365887(34-38)Online publication date: 27-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/WSCE59557.2023.10365887
Fang YZhou ZDai SYang JZhang HLu Y(2023)PaVM: A Parallel Virtual Machine for Smart Contract Execution and ValidationIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2023.333420835:1(186-202)Online publication date: 20-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TPDS.2023.3334208
Ni JXiao JZhang SLi BLi BJin H(2023)FLUID: Towards Efficient Continuous Transaction Processing in DAG-Based BlockchainsIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering10.1109/TKDE.2023.327231235:12(12679-12692)Online publication date: 2-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TKDE.2023.3272312
Singh DMalhotra M(2023)A Review on the Capability and Smart Contract Potential of Block chain Technology2023 3rd International Conference on Smart Data Intelligence (ICSMDI)10.1109/ICSMDI57622.2023.00022(80-87)Online publication date: Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSMDI57622.2023.00022
Qi XJiao JLi Y(2023)Smart Contract Parallel Execution with Fine-Grained State Accesses2023 IEEE 43rd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)10.1109/ICDCS57875.2023.00068(841-852)Online publication date: Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDCS57875.2023.00068
Ramasamy VPadmapriya SKavitha GLekha D(2023)A Centralized Blockchain Architecture with Optimum Sharing2023 8th International Conference on Communication and Electronics Systems (ICCES)10.1109/ICCES57224.2023.10192696(684-688)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCES57224.2023.10192696
Hu XBurgstaller BScholz B(2023)EVMTracer: Dynamic Analysis of the Parallelization and Redundancy Potential in the Ethereum Virtual MachineIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2023.326727711(47159-47178)Online publication date: 2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3267277
Chen WYang ZZhang JLiang JSun QZhou F(2023)Enhancing Blockchain Performance via On-chain and Off-chain CollaborationService-Oriented Computing10.1007/978-3-031-48421-6_27(393-408)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2023
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