SmartNIC-Powered Multi-threaded Proof of Work

There is a growing interest in deploying blockchain, a distributed and decentralized immutable ledger, on alternate form of hardware to improve the performance, security, energy usage and hardware cost of blockchain. However, so far, the success in utilizing alternate form of hardware has not gained popularity due to the limited benefits of using proposed alternate hardware. For example, running blockchain on a dedicated hardware setup that is separate from the primary infrastructure, such as Raspberry Pi, has limited the energy, hardware and efficiency as you need to manage an entirely separate and dedicated hardware with additional setup, wiring and more. A recent advancement in networking brought a new type of network interface card (NIC) called SmartNIC that allows users to run more advanced and customized programs on a NIC. The main set of benefits of SmartNICs include increased programmability, increased security and increased hardware cost and energy efficiency, as it provides additional computing power to a device that already must be present in a server, and freeing the CPUs to perform other important tasks. Given such benefit, this paper focuses on running customized blockchain application, based on Proof of Work mechanism, on the SmartNIC that utilizes all its available resources, which helps in removing the dependency on expensive, dedicated and specialized hardware and at the same time reduce the hardware needs for running blockchain application. The results are promising as the processing time of Proof of Work based blockchain application on a SmartNIC showed up to 72% improvement when the host is experiencing high load, all the while eliminating the need to add miscellaneous hardware dedicated for blockchain.