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

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. I...

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Published inIEEE 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
LanguageEnglish
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
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Abstract 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×.
AbstractList 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×.
Author Dai, Surong
Zhang, Hui
Zhou, Zhiyuan
Lu, Ye
Yang, Jinni
Fang, Yaozheng
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SubjectTerms Architectural design
Blockchain
Blockchains
Cryptography
Instruction sets
Peer-to-peer computing
Runtime
smart contract
Smart contracts
Synchronization
Virtual environments
virtual machine
Virtual machining
Title PaVM: A Parallel Virtual Machine for Smart Contract Execution and Validation
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