FlexChain: An Elastic Disaggregated Blockchain

While permissioned blockchains enable a family of data center applications, existing systems suffer from imbalanced loads across compute and memory, exacerbating the underutilization of cloud resources. This paper presents FlexChain, a novel permissioned blockchain system that addresses this challenge by physically disaggregating CPUs, DRAM, and storage devices to process different blockchain workloads efficiently. Disaggregation allows blockchain service providers to upgrade and expand hardware resources independently to support a wide range of smart contracts with diverse CPU and memory demands. Moreover, it ensures efficient resource utilization and hence prevents resource fragmentation in a data center. We have explored the design of XOV blockchain systems in a disaggregated fashion and developed a tiered key-value store that can elastically scale its memory and storage. Our design significantly speeds up the execution stage. We have also leveraged several techniques to parallelize the validation stage in FlexChain to further improve the overall blockchain performance. Our evaluation results show that 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.