DSG Seminar Series • Data Systems Group • When Private Blockchain Meets Deterministic Database

Please note: This seminar will take place in DC 1304

Eric Lo
Chinese University of Hong Kong

Private blockchain as a replicated transactional system shares many commonalities with a distributed database. However, the intimacy between a private blockchain and a deterministic database has never been studied. In essence, both private blockchains and deterministic databases ensure replica consistency by determinism. While private blockchains have started to pursue deterministic transaction executions recently, deterministic databases have already studied deterministic concurrency control protocols for almost a decade. In this talk, I will present Harmony, a novel deterministic concurrency control protocol for blockchain use. We use Harmony to build a new relational blockchain, namely HarmonyBC, which features low abort rates, hotspot resiliency, and inter-block parallelism, all of which are especially important to disk-oriented blockchains.

Bio: Eric Lo is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He holds an M.Phil degree from the University of Hong Kong, which he earned in 2005, and a PhD degree from ETH Zurich, which he obtained in 2007. Prior to joining CUHK, he worked at both Google and Microsoft. His recent research is centered around AI systems and geo-distributed databases. He has served on the program committee of all major data engineering conferences and currently holds the position of Associate Editor at PVLDB. His research has been recognized with best paper awards and best paper honorable mentions at conferences such as VLDB'05 and ICDE'12. Recently, his work received the ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight Award 2020.