Ph.D. student Ziliang Lai (supervised by Prof. Eric Lo) won the champion of ACM SIGMOD Student Research Competition 2021.
In this competition, students present their research results to conference attendees and compete for prizes. Ziliang won the champion with his work “When blockchain meets deterministic concurrency control“. He will also be the representative of SIGMOD to compete with winners from other SIG-sponsored conferences in the 2021 grand final.
Ziliang’s work is on transaction execution of private blockchains, where a fundamental requirement is to ensure all blockchain nodes produce the same results after executing the transactions, i.e., determinism. Such a requirement implies executing transactions parallelly would be a problem because parallel transaction execution is non-deterministic due to OS scheduling. By introducing a novel deterministic concurrency control scheme, Ziliang’s work enables private blockchains with excellent parallelism, achieving over 200% throughput improvement over the state-of-the-art private blockchains.