Poster 76: HPChain: An MPI-Based Blockchain Framework for High Performance Computing Systems

Authors: Abdullah Al-Mamun (University of Nevada, Reno; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), Tonglin Li (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), Mohammad Sadoghi (University of California, Davis), Linhua Jiang (Fudan University, Shanghai), Haoting Shen (University of Nevada, Reno), Dongfang Zhao (University of Nevada, Reno; University of California, Davis)

Abstract: Data fidelity is of prominent importance for scientific experiments and simulations. The state-of-the-art mechanism to ensure data fidelity is through data provenance. However, the provenance data itself may as well exhibit unintentional human errors and malicious data manipulation. To enable a trustworthy and reliable data fidelity service, we advocate achieving the immutability and decentralization of scientific data provenance through blockchains. Specifically, we propose HPChain, a new blockchain framework specially designed for HPC systems. HPChain employs a new consensus protocol compatible with and optimized for HPC systems. Furthermore, HPChain was implemented with MPI and integrated with an off-chain distributed provenance service to tolerate the failures caused by faulty MPI ranks. The HPChain prototype system has been deployed to 500 cores at the University of Nevada's HPC center and demonstrated strong resilience and scalability while outperforming state-of-the-art blockchains by orders of magnitude.

Best Poster Finalist (BP): no

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