PaVM: A Parallel Virtual Machine for Smart Contract Execution and Validation

• Published in: IEEE transactions on parallel and distributed systems Vol. 35; no. 1; pp. 186 - 202
• Main Authors: Fang, Yaozheng, Zhou, Zhiyuan, Dai, Surong, Yang, Jinni, Zhang, Hui, Lu, Ye
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.01.2024; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Architectural design; Blockchain; Blockchains; Cryptography; Instruction sets; Peer-to-peer computing; Runtime; smart contract; Smart contracts; Synchronization; Virtual environments; virtual machine; Virtual machining
• ISSN: 1045-9219; 1558-2183
• DOI: 10.1109/TPDS.2023.3334208

The performance bottleneck of blockchain has shifted from consensus to serial smart contract execution in transaction validation. Previous works predominantly focus on inter-contract parallel execution, but they fail to address the inherent limitations of each smart contract execution performance. In this paper, we propose PaVM, the first smart contract virtual machine that supports both inter-contract and intra-contract parallel execution to accelerate the validation process. PaVM consists of (1) key instructions for precisely recording entire runtime information at the instruction level, (2) a runtime system with a re-designed machine state and thread management to facilitate parallel execution, and (3) a read/write-operation-based receipt generation method to ensure both the correctness of operations and the consistency of blockchain data. We evaluate PaVM on the Ethereum testnet, demonstrating that it can outperform the mainstream blockchain client Geth. Our evaluation results reveal that PaVM speeds up overall validation performance by 33.4×, and enhances validation throughput by up to 46×.