Fujitsu Laboratories has announced the development of technology that it says accelerates transaction processing for Hyperledger Fabric, one of the Hyperledger blockchain frameworks hosted by The Linux Foundation.
The technology works by making the processing of communications between applications and the blockchain platform – which had been the source of bottlenecks – more efficient.
With blockchain, groups of nodes based on the number of participants form a network, and work together through the network to perform a series of processes from executing transactions to validating the legitimacy of transactions. For this reason, the number of transactions that can be executed per unit of time is limited by communication bottlenecks through the network, compared to previous centralized systems, making it difficult to apply the technology to things like online transaction systems, which demand high performance, including the ability to immediately process large volumes of transactions.
Fujitsu Laboratories says it has developed two technologies to improve transaction performance speed by reducing the number of communications between the applications and the blockchain platform. Features of the newly developed technologies are as follows:
1. Differential Update State (DUS) functionality: When processing transactions on the blockchain, a commonly used method is to retrieve the specified data, then handle the computational processing in the application before writing it back to the blockchain platform. Fujitsu has now developed functionality that executes only differential computations on the specified data, in one processing action on the blockchain platform, and functionality that reduces the number of computations directly linked with the number of communications.
2. Compound Request (CR) functionality: Fujitsu developed functionality to aggregate multiple processes to send to the blockchain platform for batch execution. This functionality not only makes processing on the blockchain platform more efficient by aggregating multiple processes, it also reduces the number of communications. The functionality maintains accuracy by rewinding to the origin point of the batch execution if a partial error occurs in the aggregated processes, and reprocessing.
Fujitsu Laboratories implemented this technology in Hyperledger Fabric v0.6.1 and measured transaction performance on a blockchain platform consisting of four servers. Whereas the previous method could handle 500 transactions per second, Fujitsu Laboratories achieved 1,350 transactions per second using this newly developed technology, an improvement of approximately 2.7 times.
With this newly developed technology, in terms of performance, the Hyperledger Fabric framework has become applicable to online transaction systems that demand high performance in excess of 1,000 transactions per second, such as those demanded by financial institutions.
Fujitsu Laboratories says it will continue development of technologies to further speed up blockchain while adapting them to the latest version of Hyperledger Fabric, and will carry out trials with a view to commercial applications of this technology, with plans to commercialize it through Fujitsu Limited during fiscal 2017.
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