Chainwire, Palo Alto, California, March 20, 2024
Pilotfish, a prototype Sai extension, was able to increase smart contract execution throughput in direct proportion to the number of machines used.
Mysten Labs, a team of leading distributed systems, programming language, and cryptography experts and founders of Sui Network, today announced a breakthrough in expanding blockchain capacity. During testing and development on the Sui blockchain environment, the Sui extension prototype, Pilotfish, successfully demonstrated linear scaling potential with an 8x increase in throughput when supported on 8 machines. In particular, the latency per transaction decreased as more machines were added during the test, proving the feasibility of linear horizontal scaling for low-latency blockchain transactions for the first time in blockchain history.
This proof of concept was formally published as an academic preprint titled “Pilotfish: Delayed Blockchain Distributed Transaction Execution” was first published and shared as an article in the open access archive arXiv on January 29, 2024.
“Pilotfish is a game-changer as the blockchain industry seeks to achieve the same dynamic capacity growth that is currently only possible with centralized server technology,” said one of the paper’s authors and a researcher at Mysten Labs, Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias. “Pilotfish has the potential to push throughput far beyond the current frontiers of high-performance blockchains, enabling levels of transaction throughput that no other blockchain in existence today can achieve.”
Sui leads the industry in terms of throughput by leveraging multiple cores to execute transactions in parallel within individual validators. Using this approach, within a few months of mainnet launch, Sui reached his 65.8 million transaction execution in one day. This is the most of any blockchain to date. However, because a single machine can only have a limited number of cores, there is a limit to how much throughput this strategy can increase. Additionally, machines that can accommodate large numbers of cores are expensive to purchase and use. Pilotfish offers an innovative solution that allows a single validator to use multiple servers simultaneously. This new technology not only allows for flexible capacity, but also enables the use of smaller, cheaper servers that are available on demand with an autoscaling architecture similar to centralized solutions like AWS and Heroku.
Almost all other blockchains aimed at scale use some form of batching, or grouping transactions together and adding them all at once. The disadvantage of this method is that it significantly increases the delay. Rather than moving directly to finality, transactions are deferred waiting for other transactions to be batched and executed. Unlike these other scaling solutions, Pilotfish provides potentially linear throughput scaling without increasing latency. At its simplest, the horizontal scaling enabled by Pilotfish allows validators to simply connect as many machines as needed and adapt their throughput and resource usage to the use case at hand.
Alberto Sonnino, research scientist at Mysten Labs, said: “Until now, the only option to increase a validator’s power was to upgrade to a more powerful machine. Pilotfish removes that constraint and allows you to scale horizontally without slowing down execution by simply adding more servers. With Pilotfish, the question is no longer whether a certain level of throughput is possible, but only how many servers are needed.”
Pilotfish achieves its great scalability by allowing a single validator to execute transactions across multiple machines. Specifically, Pilotfish divides the verification functionality into three main roles: (1) the primary, which processes sequencing transactions using high-throughput consensus, and (2) the SequencingWorkers (SW), which stores and dispatches transactions for execution. (3) Execution Workers (EW). It stores the blockchain state and executes transactions received from SW. Different components may reside on several different machines to more accurately increase the capacity of the system.
In experimental results, Pilotfish has already achieved remarkable results in terms of linear scaling, low latency, and support for a variety of workloads. In testing, Pilotfish reduced network response times and kept the latency envelope below 20ms. Future plans include enhancements such as multiple SequencingWorkers, shard replication, and ultra-fast networking.
contact
Misten Institute
lexi.wangler@mystenlabs.com
Source: the-blockchain.com
