Award Abstract # 2104882
CNS Core: Small: Towards Internet-scale Permissioned Blockchain Infrastructure for the Mobile Internet

NSF Org: CNS
Division Of Computer and Network Systems
Recipient: TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, THE
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: FY 2021 = $500,000.00
History of Investigator:
  • Boon Thau Loo (Principal Investigator)
    boonloo@cis.upenn.edu
  • Mohammadjavad Amiri (Co-Principal Investigator)
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: University of Pennsylvania
3451 WALNUT ST STE 440A
PHILADELPHIA
PA  US  19104-6205
(215)898-7293
Sponsor Congressional District: 03
Primary Place of Performance: University of Pennsylvania
3330 Walnut Street
Philadelphia
PA  US  19104-3409
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
03
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): GM1XX56LEP58
Parent UEI: GM1XX56LEP58
NSF Program(s): Special Projects - CNS,
CSR-Computer Systems Research
Primary Program Source: 01002122DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 7354, 7923
Program Element Code(s): 171400, 735400
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

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(Showing: 1 - 10 of 12)
Amiri, M J and Wu, C and Agrawal, D and El_Abbadi, A and Loo, B T and Sadoghi, M "The Bedrock of Byzantine Fault Tolerance: A Unified Platform for BFT Protocols Analysis, Implementation, and Experimentation" , 2024 Citation Details
Amiri, Mohammad Javad and Loo, Boon Thau and Agrawal, Divyakant and Abbadi, Amr El "Qanaat: a scalable multi-enterprise permissioned blockchain system with confidentiality guarantees" Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment , v.15 , 2022 https://doi.org/10.14778/3551793.3551835 Citation Details
Chen, Haoxian and Lu, Lan and Massey, Brendan and Wang, Yuepeng and Loo, Boon Thau "Verifying Declarative Smart Contracts" , 2024 https://doi.org/10.1145/3597503.3639203 Citation Details
Chen, Haoxian and Whitters, Gerald and Amiri, Mohammad Javad and Wang, Yuepeng and Loo, Boon Thau "Declarative smart contracts" Declarative Smart Contracts , 2022 https://doi.org/10.1145/3540250.3549121 Citation Details
Chen, Haoxian and Wu, Chenyuan and Zhao, Andrew and Raghothaman, Mukund and Naik, Mayur and Loo, Boon Thau "Synthesizing Formal Network Specifications From Input-Output Examples" IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking , v.31 , 2023 https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2022.3208551 Citation Details
Mohammad Javad Amiri and Ziliang Lai and Liana Patel and Boon Thau Loo and Eric Lo and Wenchao Zhou "Saguaro: An Edge Computing-enabled Hierarchical Permissioned Blockchain" 39th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) , 2023 Citation Details
Nagda, Heena and Singhal, Shubhendra Pal and Amiri, Mohammad Javad and Loo, Boon Thau "Rashnu: Data-Dependent Order-Fairness" Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment , v.17 , 2024 https://doi.org/10.14778/3665844.3665861 Citation Details
Qin, Haoyun and Wu, Chenyuan and Amiri, Mohammad Javad and Marcus, Ryan and Loo, Boon Thau "BFTGym: An Interactive Playground for BFT Protocols" Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment , v.17 , 2024 https://doi.org/10.14778/3685800.3685850 Citation Details
Qizhen Zhang and Philip Bernstein and Daniel Berger and Badrish Chandramouli and Vincent Liu and Boon Thau Loo "CompuCache: Remote Computable Caching with Spot VMs" Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR) , 2023 Citation Details
Wu, Chenyuan and Amiri, Mohammad Javad and Asch, Jared and Nagda, Heena and Zhang, Qizhen and Loo, Boon Thau "FlexChain: an elastic disaggregated blockchain" Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment , v.16 , 2022 https://doi.org/10.14778/3561261.3561264 Citation Details
Wu, Chenyuan and Amiri, Mohammad Javad and Qin, Haoyun and Mehta, Bhavana and Marcus, Ryan and Loo, Boon Thau "Towards Full Stack Adaptivity in Permissioned Blockchains" Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment , v.17 , 2024 https://doi.org/10.14778/3641204.3641216 Citation Details
(Showing: 1 - 10 of 12)

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

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