Rapper: A Parameter-Aware Repair-in-Memory Accelerator for Blockchain Storage Platform

Blockchain storage platforms reward storage nodes for keeping user-uploaded data for a certain amount of time. These storage nodes are unstable and can go online or offline unpredictably at any time, leading to potential data loss. To prevent data loss, blockchain storage platforms adopt erasure codes on user-uploaded encrypted data. Data repair processes will be performed to recover the lost data. However, the data repair processes heavily rely on time-consuming erasure coding algorithms, mainly consisting of vector-matrix multiplications. The emerging processing-in-memory technique can efficiently speed up the processing of vector-matrix multiplications. It can be integrated into blockchain storage platforms to solve the data repair issue. This paper presents Rapper, a parameter-aware repair-inmemory accelerator for blockchain storage platforms. Rapper utilizes the computing power of emerging processing-in-memory architecture so that data repair processes can be processed in a parallel manner and the overall efficiency can be improved significantly. Specifically, at the hardware level, the ReRAM memory is reorganized into our proposed double bank, XRU, XGroup, and ReRAM crossbars structure. At the software level, a parallel decoding/encoding strategy is proposed to fully exploit the internal parallelism of ReRAM. We also propose an adaptive parameter-aware mapping to handle various sizes of stripes. To demonstrate the viability of the proposed technique, a representative blockchain storage project Storj is adopted as the default storage infrastructure. Experimental results show that Rapper can achieve a 1.96 × speedup on average compared to the representative scheme.