Dapps have opened up new opportunities in different sectors like IoT and health. However one problem became quite clear in most prominent blockchain technologies and is speed. i.e, The number of transactions per second. Bitcoin for example is limited to 7 Transactions per second and that is a lot of time wasted for many applications.

There are applications for various domains that are quite demanding and that number of transactions per second would not suffice. That is where High Performance Blockchain (HPB) comes to play. As the name suggests its core proposition is speed. i,e. the high numbers of transactions per second, I am talking millions per second.

HPB is about the hardware and the software. It has various High Performance Computing concepts integrated within the architecture. Traditionally the consensus and the chain logic is all on the software level and as it stands software is usually slower than hardware when you have to handle network connections, that is why HPB created a hardware called Blockchain Offload Engine (BOE) which can be compared to a motherboard in how it looks. In its architecture it combines CPU serial capabilities and parallel processing capabilities of FPGA/ASIC chips.

The BOE system has an ARM processor in its architecture and the BOE module within is connected to other devices using a 10 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces just like how connections are in High performance machines. The BOE module handles all TCP and UDP traffic and any drops that might happen allowing the CPU to handle other processing operations. Now the focus on the network is very important because when you are mining and ensuring security within the blockchain you need to broadcast to connected machine; and that process is highly effected by network status and how it is handled. The more traffic the slower the transaction and the type of operation taking place. So when you handle the traffic in a quick and an efficient manner you have time to do and focus on what is important.





Another important component in HPB which largely contributed to security is the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm. Which is the algorithm that signs and verifies all blockchain traffic be it a transaction or a block. The algorithm has been proven to work efficiently in digital signatures however in many cases it is implemented in the software level which limits the number of verifications per second. In HPB architecture it has embedded in the BOE module, on the hardware level, to allow millions of signatures per second.

The BOE module which is meant to be unique to HPB Chain can achieve high concurrency connections; it can support 10000 sessions in parallel and 10000 simultaneous TCP sessions at the same time.

Shifting many of the time and power consuming operations to hardware lifts off a lot of load from the software level and can no longer be tied to the number of I/O and the Mobo limitations. Now with HPB network and security is handled separately and the CPU will be focused on the important stuff.

As with every blockchain technology a consensus algorithm has to be in place to ensure all nodes in the network work based on a clear protocol that all agree on. HPB's Consensus is based on two types of elections; One is called outer election and another is called inner election. The outer election is about selection of high contribution nodes from a pool of nodes. The inner election on the other hand is based on the highest contribution node from the pool of high contribution nodes. The block generation is attributed to the high contribution nodes. This can be thought of as rewarding the active nodes to keep doing more and influencing non active nodes to be active.

In Summary By reducing the impact of the network layer on the other blockchain operations HPB is able to achieve High Performance Blockchain. HPB is currently running several durability test on the BOE module and is prepping for mass production.



Resources:

Website: hpb.io

Whitepaper: http://www.hpb.io/files/hpb_white_paper_en.pdf

Twitter: https://twitter.com/HPB_Global?lang=en

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/HPB_Global/

