
NSF Org: |
CNS Division Of Computer and Network Systems |
Recipient: |
|
Initial Amendment Date: | August 24, 2021 |
Latest Amendment Date: | August 24, 2021 |
Award Number: | 2104882 |
Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
Program Manager: |
Marilyn McClure
mmcclure@nsf.gov (703)292-5197 CNS Division Of Computer and Network Systems CSE Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering |
Start Date: | October 1, 2021 |
End Date: | September 30, 2024 (Estimated) |
Total Intended Award Amount: | $500,000.00 |
Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $500,000.00 |
Funds Obligated to Date: |
|
History of Investigator: |
|
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
3451 WALNUT ST STE 440A PHILADELPHIA PA US 19104-6205 (215)898-7293 |
Sponsor Congressional District: |
|
Primary Place of Performance: |
3330 Walnut Street Philadelphia PA US 19104-3409 |
Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
|
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
|
Parent UEI: |
|
NSF Program(s): |
Special Projects - CNS, CSR-Computer Systems Research |
Primary Program Source: |
|
Program Reference Code(s): |
|
Program Element Code(s): |
|
Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.070 |
ABSTRACT
The project centers around Saguaro, a hierarchical permissioned blockchain system designed specifically for wide area networks with mobile nodes. Saguaro explores infrastructural design and systems models that are essential for realizing an Internet-scale hierarchical blockchain design compatible with modern 5G networks and beyond. Saguaro aims to provide a suite of consensus protocols to process transactions within and across domains with nodes that might follow different failure models. Saguaro will be topology-aware and will leverage the hierarchical structure of Internet-scale mobile networks to establish consensus on cross-domain transactions efficiently. To establish delay-tolerant mobile consensus, the project will explore novel consensus protocols that rely on communication between edge servers of local and remote domains to share a compressed version of the node's history.
5G's low latency, ultra-high reliability, and device to device communication, together with blockchains' transparency, immutability, provenance, and authenticity, reflect the immense potential of running a new generation of real-time data transactional applications on the mobile Internet. Saguaro will unlock the potential of a hierarchical permissioned blockchain designed specifically for edge and fog computing environments, targeting use cases ranging from mobile delay-tolerant micropayments in development countries, accountable edge applications and accountable cloud infrastructures. An affordable online for-credit master's course in Blockchain combining transaction processing and cryptography will be delivered at-scale, aimed at increasing accessibility of extremely high quality computer science education to all.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
Note:
When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external
site maintained by the publisher. Some full text articles may not yet be available without a
charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from
this site.
PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
The major goal of this project is to develop the software infrastructure to enable a highly scalable blockchain platform and applications that can support mobile applications, 5G infrastructures and edge computing. Towards this goal, the project developed scalable adaptive blockchain architectures, new declarative domain specific languages for blockchain applications, and new delay tolerant blockchain protocols.
Intellectual merit: Saguaro aims to explore blockchain applications for mobile applications using scalable data management techniques. Adachain and Flexchain apply AI and disaggregated memory to optimize blockchains dynamically. Bedrock is a novel platform for designing and implementing new Byzantine Fault Tolerant protocols (used as the underlying consensus layers in Blockchain systems), and applies domain specific languages and optimization techniques to synthesize BFT protocols given input parameters. DeCON and DCV apply declarative language based on Datalog to enable a declarative smart contract platform for specifying, implementing and verifying Smart Contracts.
In terms of outcomes, the project resulted in the development of Saguaro, a permissioned blockchain system designed specifically for edge computing networks. Saguaro leverages the hierarchical structure of edge computing networks to reduce the overhead of wide-area communication by presenting several techniques.
The second outcome involves AdaChain, a learning-based blockchain framework that adaptively chooses the best permissioned blockchain architecture to optimize effective throughput for dynamic transaction workloads. AdaChain addresses the challenge in Blockchain As-a-Service (BaaS) environments, where a large variety of possible smart contracts are deployed with different workload characteristics. The project also developed FlexChain, a novel permissioned blockchain system that addresses this challenge by physically disaggregating CPUs, DRAM, and storage devices to process different blockchain workloads efficiently.
The third research outcome resulted in Bedrock, a unified platform for BFT protocol analysis, implementation, and experimentation.
The fourth research outcome involves DeCon, a declarative programming language for implementing smart contracts and specifying contract-level properties. Driven by the observation that smart contract operations and contract-level properties can be naturally expressed as relational constraints. Building upon DeCon, the project developed an automated safety verification tool, DCV, that targets declarative smart contracts written in DeCon, a logic-based domain-specific language for smart contract implementation and specification.
In terms of demonstrated experimental impact, the Saguaro system across a wide range of workloads demonstrates the scalability of Saguaro in supporting a range of cross-domain and mobile transactions. AdaChain can converge quickly to optimal architectures under changing workloads and significantly outperform fixed architecture, all while incurring low additional overhead. FlexChain can provide independent compute and memory scalability, while incurring at most 12.8% disaggregation overhead. FlexChain achieves almost identical throughput as the state-of-the-art distributed approaches with significantly lower memory and CPU consumption for compute-intensive and memory-intensive workloads respectively. Within Bedrock, a wide range of BFT protocols can be implemented and uniformly evaluated under a unified deployment environment.
DeCon can implement realistic smart contracts such as ERC20 and ERC721 digital tokens. The evaluation results reveal the marginal overhead of DeCon compared to the open-source reference implementation, incurring 14% median gas overhead for execution, and another 16% median gas overhead for run-time verification. The DCV evaluation on 23 benchmark contracts shows that DCV is effective in verifying smart contracts adapted from public repositories, and can verify contracts not supported by other tools. Furthermore, DCV significantly outperforms baseline tools in verification time.
Saguaro was presented in ICDE 2023. Flexchain and Adachain were published in VLDB 2023. Bedrock won an outstanding paper award in NSDI 2024. DeCon and DCV were published in FSE 2022 and ICSE 2024 respectively. BFTGym (demonstration of Bedrock) was demonstrated in VLDB 2024.
Broader impact: In the main discipline of Blockchain, this work led to the development of new blockchain architectures that can adapt to dynamic workloads, be declaratively specified, and also handle wireless mobile devices. There have been advances as a result in the development of highly adaptive Blockchain systems that can handle all types of transaction workloads, mobility patterns, under changing workloads at Internet scale.
Outside of the Blockchain arena, there are three key broader impacts. First, we develop one of the first platforms for designing and running Byzantine Fault Tolerant protocols. Second, the use of a declarative language based on Datalog in a new domain of Smart Contracts was proposed and its use in verifying smart contracts was demonstrated. Third, novel use cases of memory disaggregation and AI techniques for scaling blockchains (a type of distributed systems) were developed and these techniques potentially have broad applicability outside of the Blockchain domain.
Last Modified: 12/29/2024
Modified by: Boon Thau Loo
Please report errors in award information by writing to: awardsearch@nsf.gov.