The undeniable role of hardware for scaling
By: Patty Mcpat
Tags: Scalability, Highperformanceblockchain, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Hpb

In history, many technological breakthroughs have marked mankind and its society, especially with the electronic revolution boom that we are currently living in. Cellphones, Smartphones, Internet, Connected Objects, Automation, Blockchain, Electrical cars, and many more. If one looks at all these achievements, we can only sit and admire the ingenuity of the human species to be able to solve every day problems with different technologies. The beauty of technology is often taken for granted and not understood by the masses. We all use smartphones, computers and many more but don’t understand how they work, and therefore cannot assess the complexity of such devices.

Throughout recent history, scaling was an important breakthrough in most of these electronic concepts. If you had the fortune to live through the early days of the internet using a modem, you would understand the struggle it was to download with 5–10 kb/s. Today, download speeds are reaching the hundreds of megabytes.

How was this possible, and how has been scaling solved throughout all these electronic domains?

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the importance of hardware by talking about the scaling that happen in the telecom industry, in the computer industry and in the media industry, 3 domains that are largely known and used by the population. Finally, we will talk about its application in the blockchain industry and how the only solution to solving this scaling and bottleneck is through hardware, by highlighting the solution used by HPB (High performance Blockchain).

I/- Telecom industry

The evolution of the Telecom industry has been fascinating. We will only talk about cellular devices, as we can see on this chart, we went from 1G to 4G (to possibly 5G soon).

Each of these generation of technology has marked an important improvement in the usage of the cellular network, determined by the bandwidth speed, for example we went from 2.4 Kpbs to around 100 Mbps.

How was this possible? The telecom process is incredibly complex, so I will try to simplify things as much as I can.

Let’s first explain how information is transmitted from point A to point B. Information is binary, meaning it’s 1 and 0 and each one of them is called a bit. What does this 1 and 0 correspond to? It’s simply the presence and absence of current/voltage in electrical terms. (It’s a bit more complex than that, but just keep this in your mind).

Now, this is something easy to do when you are connected through a wire or a connector. However, in Telecom, you need to transmit the information wirelessly. This is why we use transmitters and receivers where information is coded and modulated. (Relax, I will not detail this process, but it is important to understand what modulation is and how the information is transmitted in order for me to explain to you the importance of hardware). Modulation is simply transmitting information into the frequency domain often in a form of a cosinus or sinus.

For example, in 2G, we used simple modulations, such as QPSK:

In this modulation, we have 4 possible information determined by the phasing of the signal. This modulation is produced by hardware. Why couldn’t we use more points on the circle? Simply because more information with the technology back then produced more noise, therefore less accuracy in the transmission and reception of the data and in telecom you need to have the less noise possible.

As technology advanced, the modulation advanced to things like 64 QAM — 256 QAM

This is a 256 QAM, as you can see, we have massively multiplied the possibility of information sent. Therefore, we can send more bits in one message, multiplying the transmission per second.

All of this is possible thanks to hardware called a modulator which is a series of electrical components capable of producing such signals with the minimum noise possible.

Now, let us look at the architecture difference between 3G and 4G to understand that the breakthrough came from hardware:

A lot of hardware improvements. Off course software played a role like the coding of information went from CDMA to OFDMA, but mostly hardware and physical improvements brought this high throughput. But even these “software” improvements would NOT be possible, if we didn’t scale the processors. OFDMA requires massive Fourier and Inverse Fourier calculations in real time, which was impossible without an incredibly strong processing power.

2/ Computer advancement

All this talk about processing power leads me to the biggest example of where hardware played a factor. Today, you are reading my article through a computer that is the definition of scaling.

Often credit is given to software engineers for creating a software. What is a software? It’s a series of instructions with a goal to instruct the hardware components. A computer is such a complex tool to comprehend. To understand better, let’s look at how a software is done in C language.

Here is the full schematic of how a C code is compiled and ran on a computer:

A software engineer writes his code in C, then there are several steps that will not be detailed that convert this code into a language your machine understands and executes. This simplistic assembler language is a language that allows you to directly communicate with the hardware behind your computer. (Again, I will not go into details on how this is done, else this article will end up being a book of 200 pages.)

To get to my point, suppose your hardware is not fast enough, then your code will not be fast enough. That is an undeniable fact. You can write the best code in the whole world, but if your hardware is lackluster, it will be completely useless. Your computer hardware is defined by its processor, cache, memory and bus, and these are all hardware components.

Let us now look at the effect of processing.

3/ Media engineering

Have you ever tried making music? Have you tried playing a 4k game?

That’s right, the better your computer, the smoother these applications are.

Let’s look at the music industry.

You have a guitar track you recorded. You probably plugged an electric guitar to a soundcard and played through it, and recorded it. Now it’s on your computer. But, how is it possible that a continuous analogic signal is now turned into a discontinuous digital one?

Basically, depending on the sampling rate you chose, this is what concretely happened:

So what basically happened, is that on your computer, you have a sampled signal that is composed of an immense number of bits depending on the length of your signal. The better your hardware, the better your signal is sampled. This is why you buy high end soundcards, and not use your laptop’s inbuilt soundcard.

Now, the producer in you wants to start recording several tracks, let’s say drums, double track your guitars, vocals, bass. You want to start mixing and mastering these tracks, so you’re going to modify them and therefore use plugins.

You can sometimes be using over 100 plugins to modify these signals. Let’s take a look at what ONE plugin can do. For this example, let’s use high pass filtering:

Based on the frequency you chose you can eliminate unwanted noise below that frequency. How is this done? Your DAW gives you a nice graphical interface and makes it look easy, however this is all mathematics using your CPU. Remember, your signal is a succession of 1’s and 0’s interpreted as hexadecimal. This low-cut filter applies coefficient multiplication to your signal.

This is why, the more you use plugins, the more the CPU becomes overloaded, and this is why you need high end specifications capable of doing these real time calculations. Again, hardware wins because the scaling in this case is the processing power, and the processing power is improved by hardware architecture.

Bare in mind, that a retail computer was NOT designed to be efficient at multiplications and divisions. Memorize this.

4/ Scaling the blockchain

4.1/Importance of scaling

Now we get to the interesting part of this article. This is an article dedicated to blockchain, and specially to solve the scalability problem. For this technology to be commercialized, you simply need to rival the processing speed of a database.

You can’t for example, use a crypto currency for merchandise, if the payment takes 30 minutes- 1 hour to process. You’re not going to tell your client “wait till I get 6 or 30 confirmations” which will take an hour. He’s going to pay, wait, leave and never come back.

You just lost a client using bitcoin or Ethereum as a payment method. In this use case, the ideal scenario would be to have his transaction passed in a few seconds, and tops a minute.

Often, I read comments like “we don’t need that much TPS”. You can understand that this claim is absurd if blockchain would go commercial.

Now, let’s look at another use case. Decentralized applications. It is true that small DAPPS that have 50–100 users don’t require that much transactions per second, however let’s suppose that a big company would use a DAPP. Let’s take a look at Union Pay, a really huge company that processes millions of transactions a day. Suppose this company would want to start using the blockchain for various reasons, it would require a lot of TPS, else it would slow down its whole business and make the company lose an enormous amount of money.

4.2/Solutions to solve scalability

To understand these different approaches to solving scalability, a basic understanding of blockchain is necessary.

I suppose that if you are reading this article, then you know the basics of what a transaction is, else you would not be investing in cryptocurrencies. (Oh dear lord)

The whole straining process of a blockchain is nodes verifying and broadcasting a transaction, and saving the huge history of the ledger and synching it between nodes. ( I am incredibly simplifying this, you can research the details, and different models of blockchains have different consensus and work differently).

As the blockchain advances, the bigger the “database” gets. This is problematic to when the nodes want to sync, as they have to download/upload the ledger. So how do you improve TPS?

- You increase the speed of the data transmitted (internet speed, network)

- You increase the verification process (which is solving the hashing through different multiplications and divisions)

- Invent a different way to transmit information (sharding/ Plasma)

The first two are doable. The third one is theoretical and its efficiency is unproven.

The first two are hardware, the second one is software.

It does seem logical to use hardware to solve this scaling problem, something that has been used historically as an improvement point and succeeded.

Conclusion

There is only one blockchain doing this, and it’s HPB (High Performance Blockchain). This is why I’m invested in this, because it is a functioning solution to scaling. The BOE heavily improves the verification process by using a dedicated hardware capable of doing these famous multiplications and divisions at speeds 8 times faster than a conventional retail CPU.

The space is still not mature enough, but as bigger companies will get in, you will see that specialized hardware will be used more often, as it’s has been the determining factor to scaling everything as proven in this article.