Accelerating Verifiable Queries over Blockchain Database System Using Processing-in-memory

Blockchain database systems, such as Ethereum and vChain, suffer from limited memory bandwidth and high memory access latency when retrieving user-requested data. Emerging processing-in-memory (PIM) technologies are promising to accelerate users’ queries, by enabling low-latency memory access and aggregated memory bandwidth scaling with the number of PIM modules. In this article, we present Panther, the first PIM-based blockchain database system supporting efficient verifiable queries. Blocks are distributed to PIM modules for high parallelism with low inter-PIM communication cost, managed by a regression-based model. For load balance across PIM modules, data are adaptively promoted and demoted between the host and PIM sides. In multiple datasets, Panther achieves up to 23.6× speedup for verifiable queries and reduces metadata storage by orders of magnitude compared to state-of-the-art designs on real PIM hardware.