BPU: A Blockchain Processing Unit for Accelerated Smart Contract Execution

Abstract

Modern blockchains use smart contracts to implement automatic and decentralized programs, which are the foundations of Decentralized Applications (DApp). The poor performance on general purpose computers has become the bottleneck that limits the blockchain and smart contracts from being widely used. In this paper, we present BPU, a high-performance modularized blockchain processing unit. BPU aims at bringing performance and flexibility to the blockchain and DApp processing. Our design achieves significant speedup compared against the software implementation on an Intel CPU.