J.B. Scott, T. Lu, L. Peng
Tulane University,
United States
Keywords: Blockchain, cryptocurrency, smart contracts, hardware-based acceleration, parallel processing, computational efficiency, information security
Summary:
Tulane inventors have created a heterogeneous processor Smart Contract Unit (SCU). Compared to current Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) designs, SCU is a hardware-based accelerator that uses heterogeneous reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture. This allows SCU to leverage instruction-level parallelism and transaction-level parallelism during smart contract processing to boost its execution performance. Furthermore, SCU can be configured and adapted to different workloads to remove bottlenecks. Under conservative testing conditions, these features combine to reduce execution time of example blocks by 70x vs. CPU (900μs, down from 66000μs) and 1.9x vs. BPU (900μs, down from 1700μs). More varied testing conditions produced even greater savings of time – and therefore energy. Benefits include: • Hardware-based smart contract processing unit for blockchain and crypto currencies. • Reduced block execution time of multiple-fold over BPU, and even more dramatic over CPU. • Increased speed reduces cost and power consumption. • More secure than software-based systems.