BlockNIC: SmartNIC assisted Blockchain

Abstract

While the use of blockchain has proliferated across the world in many industries and application, blockchains are known to cause an ever-increasing environmental footprints due to their huge energy and hardware requirement. In order to solve a similar issue, SmartNIC, a programmable network interface card, is recently gaining traction to reduce CPU and hardware usage in the data centers by providing a way to perform relatively simple computation directly on the network. Given such characteristics, in this paper, we present our world-first blockchain infrastructure that runs completely on SmartNICs called BlockNIC. As BlockNIC runs completely on the network path on an hardware that is relatively idle, it runs without needing any extra hardware or even the host CPU. Given the infrastructure, we compare the performance of the SmartNIC in terms of hashing and consensus work against a bare-metal server. The results are extremely encouraging because they point to a unique opportunity to create scalable, secure and environmentally friendly next generation blockchain infrastructure.