ACCORD · Accelerated Ordering Service for Distributed Ledgers

Accelerated Ordering Service for Distributed Ledgers

The ACCORD project focused on the question on how can Permissioned Blockchains (PB), an emerging technology, be adapted to the needs of Enterprise data-management workloads running in the cloud and datacenters. This project contributed to a potential disruption of how companies do business: by distributing the trust over a Blockchain there is no more need for trusted third parties and this will reduce cost and impediments in doing business. The results in ACCORD make it possible for PBs to efficiently utilize the network and computational resources, as well as to achieve low latency high throughput behavior; this improved performance has a significant positive impact on the cost of transacting across companies. The starting insight of this project relies in the fact that even though it is commonly assumed that PB systems are inherently less performant than traditional Database Management Systems, by re-imagining their underlying processing, they can be made competitive and evaluated as an alternative to traditional DBMS systems. We have identified a significant challenge of achieving this goal: the high cost of the distributed communication steps of PB (the so called Ordering). Finding ways of reducing the cost of these operations was the focus of this project. The results and deliverables of the project can be used to accelerate existing, widely used PBs, such as Hyperledger Fabric, and, more importantly, they can be used provide a sound foundation for building the next generation of PBs well suited to the workloads and the execution environment typical for large Enterprises. The methodology of the project was to combine benchmarking of widely used PBs with analytical modeling and bottleneck analysis, and, finally, implementation on modern server hardware that combines regular CPUs with programmable hardware, namely Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Thanks to this multi-pronged approach, the project has generated valuable insights at various levels (i.e., providing not only general recommendations for designing future Ordering services for blockchains but also hardware implementation lessons, etc.). We have released our results as Technical Reports and the source code can be found in Open Repositories hosted by the IMDEA Software Institute.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз