Fujitsu Laboratories announced this week they have developed a technology which accelerates transaction processing for Hyperledger Fabric, a Hyperledger blockchain framework hosted by the Linux Foundation.
Fujitsu’s technology speeds up transaction processing by streamlining communications between the blockchain platform and applications. In a trial where this technology was implemented in Hyperledger Fabric v0.6.1, it increased transaction performance by approximately 2.7 times compared to the previous method.
Hyperledger Fabric uses a consortium-type structure that limits the number of participants. It is undergoing trials in finance, supply chain management, insurance and energy.
Blockchain does have its issues, Fujitsu said. The structure of node groups that execute and validate transactions, where they are based on the number of participants, can produce bottlenecks that limit its application in environments requiring large transaction volumes. Fujitsu learned that in network conditions with a maximum allowable processing time of 64 milliseconds, communication between applications and the blockchain platform during transaction processing are the main bottleneck cause.
Fujitsu developed two solutions in response. The first, Differential Update State (DUS) Functionality, only executes differential computations on specified data in one processing action on the blockchain platform. That reduces the number of computations directly linked with the number of communications.
The second is termed Compound Request (CR) Functionality, a process where multiple processes are aggregated and total communications reduced. Accuracy is maintained by rewinding to the origin point of the batch execution if a partial error occurs in the aggregated processes and then reprocessing.
The technology was tested in Hyperledger Fabric vo.6.1, with transaction performance measured on a four-server blockchain platform. Previous methods handled up to 500 transactions per second, but this technology achieved 1,350, an important milestone as some industries requiring minimum processing of 1,000 transactions per second.
Contributors
