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

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 17x speedup in block validation when compared to the software-only validator peer, with commit throughput of up to 95,600 tps (~4.5x improvement over the best reported in literature).