  While state-of-the-art permissioned blockchains can achieve thousands of
transactions per second on commodity hardware with x86/64 architecture, their
performance when running on different architectures is not clear. The goal of
this work is to characterize the performance and cost of permissioned
blockchains on different hardware systems, which is important as diverse
application domains are adopting t. To this end, we conduct extensive cost and
performance evaluation of two permissioned blockchains, namely Hyperledger
Fabric and ConsenSys Quorum, on five different types of hardware covering both
x86/64 and ARM architecture, as well as, both cloud and edge computing. The
hardware nodes include servers with Intel Xeon CPU, servers with ARM-based
Amazon Graviton CPU, and edge devices with ARM-based CPU. Our results reveal a
diverse profile of the two blockchains across different settings, demonstrating
the impact of hardware choices on the overall performance and cost. We find
that Graviton servers outperform Xeon servers in many settings, due to their
powerful CPU and high memory bandwidth. Edge devices with ARM architecture, on
the other hand, exhibit low performance. When comparing the cloud with the
edge, we show that the cost of the latter is much smaller in the long run if
manpower cost is not considered.
