Files
papers/lux-blockchain-scaling-laws/sections/99-conclusion.tex
zeekay adfe7c8ad8 papers: lux-blockchain-scaling-laws — empirical Metal/WGSL/CPU NTT crossover + scaling laws
First measured scaling laws for post-quantum threshold consensus on
heterogeneous hardware. Real numbers from M1 Max with wgpu-native
29.0.0 (real WebGPU, not polyfill).

Main findings:
* CPU per-NTT cost flat at ~1.4 us across n=1..65536.
* Metal: 1.5 ms per dispatch, crosses CPU at n~3260, peaks 1.48x
  at n=65536.
* WGSL: 2.7 ms per dispatch, asymptotic per-op (1.58 us) HIGHER
  than CPU (1.38 us) — never crosses on M1 Max. Constraint:
  uint32-emulated u64 vs Metal's native u64.
* Pulsar production hot path n=2688 sits below both crossovers.
  Per-validator GPU acceleration unprofitable; aggregator-side
  multi-validator batching wins.

Three empirical scaling laws derived:
* L1 batch-size law: T_GPU/poly(n) = D/n + tau, crossover n* = D/(tau_CPU - tau_GPU).
* L2 validator-parallelism law: aggregator amortizes dispatch over k validators.
* L3 epoch-amortization law: workloads that batch at epoch boundary cross n* far earlier.

Sections (660 LoC of LaTeX):
  01-introduction       — claim summary + sharpest finding
  02-methodology        — bench harness, hardware, threats to validity
  03-measurements       — TSV-grade tables of NTT sweep + workload-level (ZAP, FHE, reshare)
  04-scaling-laws       — three theorems with fitted constants
  05-implications       — concrete posture for backend.Policy defaults
  06-honesty            — what was measured vs not (NVIDIA, Block-STM, DEX, e2e)
  99-conclusion         — production posture + queued workstreams

Data/ directory carries the raw TSV
(ntt-sweep-m1max-2026-05-04.tsv) emitted by the new
corona_lattice_ring_sweep_bench.

Honest scope: NVIDIA H100, Block-STM parallel EVM throughput, DEX
matching engine, and end-to-end consensus+EVM+DEX+FHE pipeline are
all queued for v0.3.0; not in this paper. Section 06 documents the
boundary.
2026-05-04 11:04:37 -07:00

53 lines
2.3 KiB
TeX

\section{Conclusion}
\label{sec:conclusion}
We presented the first measured scaling laws for post-quantum
threshold consensus on heterogeneous hardware (CPU, Metal, WGSL via
wgpu-native), grounded in $30$ data points across $10$ batch sizes
and $3$ backends running the canonical Lux Pulsar NTT primitive.
The single sharpest finding: \textbf{GPU acceleration of lattice
crypto is a story about batch size, not throughput-per-op.} On
Apple M1 Max:
\begin{itemize}[nosep]
\item Metal pays $\sim 1.5$ ms per command-buffer dispatch;
amortizing this requires $n \geq \sim 3{,}260$ polynomials per
call. Below that, CPU wins by $1$--$3$ orders of magnitude.
\item WGSL via wgpu-native pays $\sim 2.7$ ms per dispatch and
its asymptotic per-op cost is HIGHER than CPU on this hardware
($1.58$ vs $1.38$ \textmu s), so it never crosses CPU at any
finite batch size. The constant-factor gap is uint32-emulated u64
arithmetic vs Metal's native u64 path.
\item The Pulsar production hot path ($n = 2{,}688$) sits below
both crossovers. Per-validator GPU acceleration is unprofitable;
aggregator-side multi-validator batching wins (Theorem~\ref{thm:l2}).
\end{itemize}
These observations collapse into three empirical scaling laws —
the batch-size law (L1), the validator-parallelism law (L2), and the
epoch-amortization law (L3) — that together govern when a Lux
component should dispatch to GPU versus stay on CPU.
\paragraph{Production posture.}
The default for consensus paths in \texttt{luxfi/math/backend} is
\texttt{PolicyPureGo}: deterministic, no surprise, no GPU-vs-CPU
transcript-byte risk. \texttt{PolicyGPUPreferred} is opt-in for
aggregator paths and FHE evaluators, where the natural batch
crosses the $n^*$ threshold.
\paragraph{What's next.}
Three follow-on workstreams are queued but out of scope for this
paper:
\begin{itemize}[nosep]
\item NVIDIA H100 / RTX measurement on a CUDA-elevated CI runner.
\item Block-STM parallel EVM throughput under contention model.
\item End-to-end consensus + EVM + DEX + FHE pipeline measurement.
\end{itemize}
\S\ref{sec:honesty} documents the honest scope.
\paragraph{Reproducibility.}
All bench harnesses ship in tree, all KAT corpora are
deterministic, the wgpu-native dependency is one
\texttt{brew install}. The exact M1 Max numbers in this paper
re-derive within $\pm 5\%$ on a warm-CPU rerun.