I've thought to myself, they must be, you know, I wonder what could help me tap into what feels best at that point in time. Yeah, what I did in my life was, many years ago, I sensed that too. I sensed that I wanted a better discernment between the ego and the Holy Spirit. And I thought to myself, yes, the Holy Spirit is, can you give me something practical that can help me? Even if it's going to take me time, I'm willing to work on it. You can give me something practical. And the Holy Spirit said, well, just look at your life as it seems to be, you know, your life of the world. And just begin to start to consider how many of your actions every day that you go through your daily life are based on fear of consequences. And I said, that's what it means, fear of consequences. And the Holy Spirit said, well, let's say, for instance, your job, would you go to that job every day unless you had fear of consequences? And I said, of course not. I wouldn't be going to work every day if I had no fear of consequences in the Holy Spirit. Okay, that's one aspect of your life that we can identify as based on fear of consequences. And then, you know, you can go through all the daily little nuances that seems to be part of the day, including, we would say, very subtle aspects of people policing, not wanting to let people down, not wanting to hurt people's feelings, not wanting to step on anyone's toes. Recently I was in London, and I was over there, and I kind of moved through London and everything, and I noticed this word kept coming up all the time, sorry. You know, I would go, sorry, sorry, sorry, touch an elbow on the tube, sorry. You know, it was like, sorry, sorry, it was like a giant apology going on everywhere. I wonder if people are kind of stiff over here. I'm afraid they might touch or do something to somebody. So I was like, well, there it is, that was just an example of an overly sensitive to not wanting to be in someone's space or do anything disturbing.  It doesn't even go in touch. Sorry, I stared at you for 7.2 seconds, and that's over the limit. That was very rude of me to stare at you for that long. You know, it's still this, it's based on fear of consequence. So then I started to do that with my life, and I thought, well, that's practical, I can do that. I'll sit down and I'll pay attention as I go through the day to what actions I'm doing based on fear of consequences. Because the implication is, Jesus and Holy Spirit are saying, imagine if you were only motivated by love, only by love and nothing else, imagine how your life would go. Imagine how different it would be if love was your only motivator and there was no sense of fear pushing you. And then that actually helps us to start to get into a good discernment and start to, I'd say, investigate a little bit. Like, I would do that. I was over at the University of Cincinnati. I was there, like I said, for 10 years for full time, and I would go walk in the woods. And I think especially by the time I got into graduate school, I took these long walks. Like, what am I doing this for? There's no purpose for this. And you would say, yes, you need to have a degree because you need to have a good job because if you want to have a relationship, you can't be poor and broke. And you go, well, of course it would rattle off.  But it was like, and then I would have to start to open up more to Jesus and just ask, you know, why am I here? Am I afraid of something? Is there something driving me to get all this education? Is there something pushing me underneath? Am I afraid of something?  Many people do that. They don't need a graduate degree to have a full life. And then the more I took it inwards, the more it was Jesus was able to say, yeah, you want freedom, peace, happiness, joy, love, intimacy and you believe many things about what you have to do in this world to get those things and that's driving you. And he was saying, if you listen to me, I will show you how to experience those things if you want through me. In other words, through following me. And it will come from the inside of you. It will not come from any event or outcome in the world. And so that's what honestly turned me in the right direction to start, to actually start to look where my actions were motivated by fear of consequences. And I was astounded at the beginning. There was so many. It was a huge percentage. It was a bit, you know, you could be tempted to judge yourself and go, God, what am I doing here? You know, really. But it's like, no, no, don't do that. Just be happy to start to discover how you're plugged in to fear of consequences and then unplug, you know, with the Spirit's help. And that's the way that it goes. So to me, I found that very practical. It's something I could really contemplate and ponder. I knew it would be a big job. I wasn't thinking it was like going and taking a pill and wake up the next day. I'm free in fear. I knew that it would take contemplation, mind training, practice. But with the Course in Miracles, you know, it's a great tool. It's really a sharp blade that just throws down into your mind.


فهو يساعدة الله سبحانه وتعالى جداً فهو يساعدة في أهل البيت أننا لا نحن لدي هذا الوصول على محاولة فهو يساعدة في أهل البيت نعم! أخبرني أن هناك تساعدة لتساعدة الإسلام وإسلام هذا هو there مع الوصول على أهل البيت هناك أيضاً شيء يساعدة يقولون why are Muslim countries such a mess look at it you guys claim to be Muslims you have the best of religion why is your country such a mess here there is no simple answer but if we were to use a simple answer the answer would be colonialism there is a professor at Columbia University by the name of Mahmood Mamdani he wrote a book Mahmood Mamdani says in that book and this is quoted by Joseph Masad or Masad in Islam and Liberalism where he says Mamdani concludes the most listen to this the most important legacy of colonial rule may lie in the inherited impediments to democratization the most important legacy of colonial rule may lie in the inherited impediments to democratization impediments to democratization that's the most inherited legacy of colonial rule they put impediments to democracy so this was planned in 1916 in 1916 many people don't know this two diplomats one was British and one was French the British was Mark Sykes the French was Francois George Pico it's known as the Sykes-Pico agreement look it up in 1916 a French and a British this was at the time when now the Ottoman Empire is on the collapse it's about collapsing they met they sat down on a table and they took a map of the Middle East they said let's divide now how are we going to divide the Middle East well this is Iraq this is Egypt this is Syria this is etc etc what would you like this is what I like oh ok I'll take this part that's exactly what happened two diplomats and the Middle East was divided enough? no then agents were sent you guys have heard the famous Lawrence of Arabia that's a famous name but there was another agent sent to Iraq specifically only Iraq a British agent by the name of Gertrude Bell she was an agent came under the idea of an archeologist that I am an archeologist she came as an archeologist yet her plan was to basically put Iraq together how are you going to put Iraq and she helped develop the constitution of Iraq under the monarchy so the whole process was carved out was made I have a friend of mine who did his specialization in African studies so one day I asked him do you know the pictures we get about Africa they are always in poverty for example in difficulties has Africa always been in poverty he said of course not I told him then what happened he said I'll tell you one example I'll give you one example Rwanda I'll give you that one example Rwanda he said in Rwanda you have tribes different tribes he said they came to those people in Africa they told them instead of you being farmers of vegetables for example crops all that instead start farming coffee and tea and will pay you better money than potatoes for example carrots etc don't stop farming that stuff it's useless farm coffee and tea and will buy it from you so they started then farming coffee and tea and they started paying them good top dollar for it this lasted for generations after generations of farming coffee and tea then they came back to them and they said well if we used to pay you let's say for example a dollar per kilogram for example now we're gonna pay you 5 cents per kilogram so imagine immediately the whole economy collapsed and people started living in poverty people started living in difficulties and that's because of generations now it's difficult to go back to farming what they used to farm before this is generations so there was a systematic plan in addition they came to tribes tribe and they divided the tribe in the middle this is Rwanda for example this is another country now if you wanna go from here to there you're not allowed you have to have a passport what passport this is my cousin living over there my brother's lived on now there are borders so borders were established then they took the weaker tribe they gave it power and arms and made it on top of the majority the Hutu and the Tutsis those two tribes they gave they armed the smaller tribe and they made it on top of the bigger tribe so then problem started to happen which resulted in the genocide in the 90's that we saw in Rwanda see that this did not happen overnight systematic Subhanallah brothers and sisters I tell some mu'mineen when you took take a look sometimes at an ant take a look at an ant for example you feel you know sometimes guilty to step on the ant you know say millions of lives are being wasted and people don't even blink an eye why because of greed and power and authority the love of power is the most destructive power love kind of love what establish civilizations the love of power what destroy civilizations the love of power so we always have to be careful now this also begs another question some people say ok so when some people ask you brothers and sisters say listen our countries yes some muslim countries they are unfortunately living a very messed up life some but that is because of a systematic rule in addition there were people who are hypocrites who collaborated yes indeed there are these who collaborated and they worked so we're not putting all the blame yes there are some traders just like you had traders at the time of Rasoolallah and Imam Ali and Imam Al-Hasan Alayhim Al-Salam the same kind of people exist today what made Imam Al-Hasan give up the خلافة to Mu'awiya be forced to give it up to have that peace treaty with him the same kinds of people the same kinds of people the same kinds of people they're still in existence nothing has changed there is a system here against Islam and a system against Shi'ism now there is a system against Shi'ism brothers and sisters I'll tell you a couple of examples one very old one is recent one old is in the 1890s 1890s the British signed an agreement called the tobacco agreement with Iran the idea was that they would drain all the resources of Iran that country at the time one of the مراجع التقليد at the time ayatullah shehrazi at the time he issued a fatwa where he says anyone who deals with tobacco farming it selling it لأني سأسمعه ، يقول إنه حرام ، إنه حرام even in your house so that king lost control even in his palace that agreement which was billions of dollars worth collapsed because of a fatwa of a man living in a house no arms, no guards, no machine guns, no tanks هذا يجعلهم ذلك ، my lord this is quite powerful this fatwa is very powerful and those Shi'a and their relationship with their marj'at Taqleed is very scary ريسانتلي brothers and sisters in 2014 what happened in Iraq The country was supposed to be swept away, خلص. Correct? Those of you who are old enough you remember this is not long history this is five years ago ما يلا بلس أورع علماء في ذلك الحالة أية الله سستاني حبيضه الله ورعا أشيوه the fatwa of jihad that you have to defend the country defend the people whether they are Christians whether they are Shi'a whether they are Sunni whether they are Izzidis you need to protect the country the people defend them three million people then jumped and started defending and fighting and الحمد لله people were saved lives were protected and the marakad of Ahlu al Bayti عليهم السلام were saved with the fatwa so those people who wasted billions of dollars all of the sudden now that investment that they made is gone because of one word a statement that's quite dangerous isn't it brothers and sisters let me ask you a question you invest billions of dollars in an investment someone comes and ruins it for you how would you feel towards them you want to destroy it so now it's coming why do you listen to these مراجع التقليد why do you listen to people living in Najaf and Qom they tell you what your life you guys are intellectuals you're smart enough do you need someone to dictate to you well I am smart I have PhDs الحمد لله but when I get sick I have to refer to an expert a physician I am smart I'm not stupid when I need help with law I refer to a lawyer when I need help with building and design I refer to an architect or an engineer and when I need help with Fiqh and jurisprudence I refer to a Fiqih why when it comes to Fiqh and Fuqaha all of the sudden know you're smart you can do it on your own and then why do you attend Imam al-Hussain brothers and sisters one of the reasons the religion of Islam has been saved is through Imam al-Hussain why do we read in his ziyara the religion is saved that's why one of the علماء before he started his Salah before he started his Salah before he says before he says he would say they asked him one day why do you do that he said because if it weren't for the martyrdom of Imam al-Hussain I wouldn't be standing to pray today I would have lost my Salat Imam al-Hussain saved the Salat he saved the religion of his grandfather so of hussain is so dangerous well then we need to keep people away from hussain don't attend majalis don't listen to what those people tell you from these members from these pulpits so my brothers and sisters with you attending the majalis with you choosing to change yourselves to become the true Shi'a of hussain you are resisting that movement and you are resisting these forces for that we always would always raise our voice and say


Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Protocol Labs Research Seminar Series. Today we're hosting Roddy and Alexander. They're about to give a talk based on their paper titled BlockSTM, Scaling Blockchain Execution by Turning Ordering Curse to a Performance Blessing. Roddy and Alexander are blockchain researchers and founding members of Aptos, and I'll let you take it from here. Thank you again for having me and thank you for the introduction and let me jump into it. So we'll present today BlockSTM, Scaling Blockchain Execution by Turning Ordering Curse to a Performance Blessing. And this is how we can execute 160,000 transactions per second on the Aptos blockchain. And this is a joint work with Watigela Shibili, Julian Chiang, George Daenerys, Zikun Li, Yu Chia, Runtian Zhu, and Dalia Malki. So I think for this audience, I don't need to explain or motivate too much why scaling blockchain execution is one of the most important problems now. But I do want to say that roughly speaking, every blockchain consists of three main components, which is the first is the execution, validators need to agree on the order of the blocks. And we know that this problem was studied very a lot recently and there was a few recent developments such as Milby, MilbyFT, and Narvel and Task. We know that we can execute more than 100,000 transactions per second. However, the end-to-end blockchain latency will be as good as the weakest component. And currently there is nothing good for execution. So this is what we try to tackle in this work. So in the execution layer, we have our validators after they already agreed on the sequence of blocks. They need to take these blocks one by one, execute the transaction inside the blocks, and then apply the final state to their storage to persisting the result of the transactions. So far what we see in existing blockchains, existing L1 from the engineering point of view is two approaches. One is to take just to execute everything sequentially. And this is of course not scalable. This will become very soon, not already a bottleneck in any blockchain system. The other approach is to try to use parallelism. However, most of the time, they require users to specify and give some extra information alongside with the transactions such as declare the dependencies or give some hints of what are the right sets. So of course this is not ergonomic for the users, for the user's point of view, but also it's also very limiting and not the best experience. There's movement to our goal in this work, which is to design a parallel execution engine that from the one hand will be transparent to the users. From the user's point of view, the user might think that everything underneath is executed sequentially. He doesn't need to do anything. But on the other hand, we do want an engine that will be adaptive to the workload, which means that if the workload is highly parallelizable, meaning that there are very few conflicts in the workload, then we can extract the inherent parallelism and achieve very high throughput. But not less importantly, if we get a workload that is very sequential, meaning that there are a lot of conflicts between the transactions, then we want to introduce as little overhead synchronization over as possible compared to the sequential execution of the workload. And of course there is some prior work on academic prior work on how to solve this problem. So the first approach that I want to present is called the minor replay, which was introduced a few years ago. So in this approach we have the minor. It can be a minor in permissionless settings. It can be a leader in permission settings. It doesn't matter. But the idea is there is one entity which executes the transaction first. And it can do it sequentially. It can do it with some black box other solution. And then after executing it, you can extract the dependency tag, the graph of all dependencies in the transaction between the transactions. And then it can send this tag to the other validators. Now they in turn can use this tag in order to come up with a perfect fault join schedule, which will extract the perfect parallelism. This approach has some limitation. First is that maybe the validators, they can execute very fast, but what about the minor? The minor is still slow. We need to go and execute the transaction first. And the overall latency is high. And not less importantly, there is an issue of trust. If the minor is based on team, why would validators trust him? The next approach is BOM, which is actually from the database context, in which they propose to execute the transaction according to a fixed price at order. Meaning that they a priori agree on the order of transactions. And a priori agree, so the execution, the final state of their execution should be equivalent to go and execute this transaction according to this predefined, agreed fixed order. If they can, and in this, in this work, they assume that they know all the, all the, all the, all the estimations of the, of the, of the right locations. So by, for example, by some static analysis and play execution. And if, if they know, if they know everything, if they know where each transaction is going to write, what they do, and they, they prepare, they statically prepare data structures before the execution for every possible memory location. And they prepare a slot for every, for every transaction is estimated, is estimated to write there. So when a, when another transaction wants to read from this memory location, it knows exactly what slot it should look for. So if, if, for example, in this example, the, the, the, the value seven is already there. So the transaction can continue. However, in this example, the value is not, is not yet there, but it's estimated to be there. So the transaction should wait. Otherwise, otherwise, yeah, you just have to wait. This approach required, requires perfect, or maybe over, at least perfect over, over, over estimation of the rise. And I'm not sure it's very realistic in the blockchain settings because, because we want to support arbitrary smart contracts. And many times we don't even know in advance where we're going to write. If we have an unestimated right, then the best, then the best bond can do is just to update their estimations and they restart from scratch. Another prior work, which is huge prior work, which is called software transactional memory was introduced first time, I think 30 years ago and studied a lot since then. And, and the idea is there is come up with a, with a framework to atomically execute arbitrary transactions. So from the user experience point of view, this is very good. What the user needs to do in, if you use a software transactional memory library is to specify a begin, the transaction begin, then it can write an arbitrary code, specify transaction end, and the library makes sense, make sure that all the code between the begin transaction and transaction is executed atomically. So, so the so the user doesn't not to do that does not, doesn't need to do anything with optimistic concurrency control. What's happening is that we have the pool of transaction that are statically mapped to Fred. So Fred takes a transaction, he executes it, then during the execution, he keeps tracks of read set and write set, then in it, then then after the execution and it's to validate the reads to make sure that nothing changed. So all the decision he makes during the transaction is still valid. And then if validation, if validation succeed, then he can commit, otherwise I need to, otherwise I need to retry execution. So this approach seems like, seems very good. And it seems like it can be a good fit for blockchains. However, there are, however, there are a few problems. So first, in practice, even though there are like 30,000 of papers, academic papers and software transactional memory in practice, they are very rarely deployed. And this is before you, this is because usually their performance is very limited compared to, to, to, to other, to other fine grained solution. And this is, this is because like keeping track of the bookkeeping and the synchronization over it is usually high. In addition, generally the outcome of STMs is not deterministic. So if we have two validators that execute the same block, it's possible that they will come up with, with different, with different final states because, because they are, because they are executing the transaction in different order. So deterministic and, and preset order STMs do exist. However, they treat, they treat it as a cause. They treat it as an additional limitation, limitation on constrain on the system. And as a result, their performance is, is, is even worse. And however, the good news about STMs that we know that they can be very, very efficient if they are, if they are applied for a specific purpose, a specific use case. In the next few slides, I'm going to try to convince you that blockchain is actually a specific use case that might be good for, for STMs. So first is the blockchain reality. And what I mean by that is that in, in, in general purpose STM, we need to commit transactions in the, individually, like each transaction right by one. However, in the blockchain, in the, for the blockchain, it doesn't matter.  So this can save a lot of synchronization overhead in, in, in tracking the individual commit, when can we commit a transaction with just, we can just commit the entire block. And another, another win from the block minority is the, is that garbage collection comes for free. Usually, usually STMs pay a lot of synchronization, although to know when they can reclaim memory and things like this. And here we can just do it previally in between, in between block executions. Another use case of the blockchain is the, is the, is the safety of the VM. So usually, again, in STMs, when we, when we use STMs, optimistically, optimistically execute transactions, meaning that some of the transaction can, transaction can read values that, that just wrong values. And in order to make sure that the program is not, is not, does not, does not come to some inconsistent states, STMs usually, usually pay a lot in synchronization overhead to satisfy a property called opacity, meaning that in every, in every read, every read that the transaction does, every state that the transaction does is, is, is, is legal. So here, here is one example, suppose that we have a problem with the following invariant in which X is always greater than Y. And if you see, as you see in this example, if the transaction here are executed sequentially, that this is variant always hold. However, let's see the following concurrent execution. So, so the green thread comes and can write X equal to then the blue thread, the blue thread goes and read X. Later, the purple thread goes, write X equal to three, but it doesn't matter because the green, the blue thread already, already read X equal to and then the purple thread goes and write Y equal to Y equal to next, the blue thread will go read, read Y and accidentally divide, divide by zero, which might, which might crash the entire program. However, because in the blockchain, in the blockchain use case, we already have a VM that has to guarantee and protect against any, any arbitrary smart contracts bugs, then we don't, we don't need to care about, we don't need to care about this issue. This is already provided by, provided by us, provided for us by the VM. So we can save a lot in synchronization overhead, not worry about it. The two first observation where I think it's very intuitively intuitive how they can improve our performance and save on synchronization overhead. Now the third observation is, is at least to me was it was completely contraintuitive. So, and the observation is that, that preset all their defining the order of transaction can be a performance blessing. And what I mean by defining the order of transaction is that the final state of the execution is equivalent to going and execute the transaction one by one in some predefined order. This is what I mean. And to be fair, this observation, as I already mentioned earlier, was already done by Bohm in the context of databases. But we believe that in this work, we take this observation into the extreme and use it in many, many, many, many places. Here's some intuition of why, why this might be helpful. So, so consider, consider to transaction X and Y. And if we don't have a preset order, then we don't know, we don't know a priori which transaction should go first. So, so if the purple thread goes first, then X is serialized before Y. However, if the green thread goes first, then Y is serialized before X. Otherwise, if they, if they, if they, if they both go concurrently, then it depends. And inherently, they need to solve some consensus like synchronization tasks in order to determine who goes first. And this is a lot of synchronization over it, at least intuitively. And when, when we, when we predefined the order, we don't need to solve this task. We just need to make sure that, that everybody knows the order and follow it.  And first, I want to describe the component, the system components. So we have the VM and we treat it as a black box. We give it a transaction, a single transaction, it executes it. Similar to bone, we are going to use multi-version data structures in order to avoid white-white conflicts. But differently from bone, we are not going, we are not assuming that we know the estimation. So we are not building this multi-version data structure statically at the beginning. Instead, we are going to, we are going to loan the estimations on the flight, on the fly, and we are going to build this multi-version data structure dynamically. Now, another difference from, from general-purpose STM is that we don't statically map transactions to the executor, the executor, executing threads. And so, so instead we have we have some collaborative schedule to which thread goes to get their next, next, next, next transaction, either to executor to validate. And we have the executor, which is basically the main loop, which control all the logic of the thread. So, so here is roughly how it works. A thread goes to the collaborative scheduler to ask to the, to get the next task to, to, to the next, the next task to perform. If it is an execution task, then the first goes to VM and ask the VM to execute a transaction. The VM in turn will go to the multi-version data structure in order to read. Then after the, after the VM finished the execution, the VM doesn't write back to the multi-version data structure. Instead, it returns a read and write set to the executor, so that the executor can, can track it for future validation. And then the executor, then the thread goes and apply the rights to the multi-version, multi-version data structure. Now, if the tax, if, if, if the, if the thread gets a validation tax, the tax task, sorry, from, from the collaborative scheduler, then it needs to go and revalidate the reads, all the reads it has in, in its read set, it needs to go and revalidate. Anyway, in both cases, execution and validation, the thread goes back to the collaborative scheduler and update it according to the result on the, so the the collaborative scheduler knows what are the next transaction that needs execution and revalidation. So now a few words about the multi-version data structure that we're using. The multi-version, the data structure itself is not, is not novel. We're using a standard, is not, is not novel. We're using a standard multi-version data structure for every, every location in order to avoid write-write conflicts. So what we do is that whenever a transaction wants to write a value, it just goes and it just goes and adds a new slot to the, to the data structure for this example, in this example, transaction number six. Now, when a transaction wants to read a value, let's say transaction number five here, it goes in the multi-version data structure and finds the, the, the index, define the value written by the, the highest transaction, transaction that is lower, lower than, lower than the transaction. In this case, transaction five reads the value written by transaction three. Now let's talk about the collaborative scheduler, which is, which is where the most of the, most of the logic of our block stream is. We need, we need a logic to find the next task. And abstractly, you can think of it as a, as a global, global queue of tasks, which, which threads goes and, and pick from. But also remember that we need to respect the preset order, right? We need to execute the transaction according to, to the, the preset order. So, so the collaborative schedule needs to make sure that we prioritize execution and validation tasks for lower transactions. In addition, validation must, must, must logically occur in a sequence and I explain it in a second. So, so, so here is an example. Here is our preset order, right? So first, first, first we go and execute, let's say concurrently, optimistically concurrently transaction one, two and three. Then we need to, need to validate it also optimistically. Concurrently we go and validate transaction one, two and three. Then assume that transaction one and three, they, they were good and validation succeed, but, but transaction two abodes. Okay, so transaction two has to be executed. And now, importantly, after transaction two is reexecuted, because we need to, because we need to go according to the preset order, in transaction three, need to be validated again and possibly again, possibly maybe, maybe also reexecuted. The collaborative scheduler optimistically dispatch both execution and validation tasks. And, and we know that successful validation doesn't mean, doesn't, doesn't mean safe to commit. However, fade validation, fade validation means, means need to reexecute. So the collaborative scheduler needs to keep, keep, keep, keep dispatching this validation and execution tasks and somehow eventually decide that, okay, no more tasks, we can commit the entire block. Another purpose of the collaborative scheduler also manage the dependencies. So, and we're, as I, as I said before, like, similarly to bone, we leverage the preset order in order to, in order to reduce the bolt rate. And the way we do it is that if transaction X twice reading a location, the transaction Y is estimated to read, to read from, and we know that X depends on Y according to the preset order. Then, then we need to suspend X and add, add X to the Y dependency, meaning that whenever, whenever Y is finally executed, then we can unsuspend X and block X and let it continue the execution. Okay, so before, before I told you that we don't, we did not assume anything about the estimation, right? So, so how exactly we compute them on the flight? Remember our multiversion data structure library data, sorry, multiversion data structure, we are going to use their boards to estimate the rights and use the multiversion data structure to track them. So, here is an example. Let's say, let's say transaction three executes, writes its value to the mult, to the data structure, and then at some point fails validation. So, what it goes and the transaction needs to go to all the places it touched, and all the values it wrote before, it goes and instead of just deleting them, it's going to mark them as estimation. So, so later, if a transaction later come, again, transaction number five comes, the value, the transaction number five needs to read is the value written by transaction three, because it's always loops for the highest transaction road to this location, which is lower than five. And then five comes and see that the value is not there. However, however, there is an estimation mark there, which means that transaction three is currently executing and is luckily, and it's likely to write here again. So, it's better for transaction five to just wait, because otherwise it will execute and do some just do wasted work, because probably it will need to fail validation and we will need to be executed. And this is how we can also have cascades of our boards. So, if you want to compare our approach of right estimation to, for example, from pre execution, right, we could try and learn the estimation by static and by just go and execute the transactions just from the from the initial stages go and execute the transaction just to see where they're going to write. So, in the good case, when we execute, so first thing we execute, we never do pre execution, we just execute. So, if we are lucky and we can commit the transaction without ever executing it, then we are not wasting any work, right. And the bad case, when we do need to execute and we are both at the first execution, then at least the estimation that we have is much fresher. We have them for a fresher state. And if we compare to the right estimate, the assumption or in bone, the right estimation are given. So, in BlockSTM, this is just an optimization, the protocol will work fine even if we will not estimate rights at all. The collaborative scheduler is really like where the main logic is for BlockSTM and the key for our performance is to implement the logic as efficiently as possible. We need a way to pick tasks with the lower transaction index. And if we just use older set or priority queue, which are available in the standard libraries, and then even if this older set have relaxed semantics, we know then in January they cannot scale because the queues, they have too much contention. So, we once again leverage the preset order and by and by using it, we are able to implement accounting-based very efficient concurrent order set. I'm going to give you now the high-level intuition. So, in order to do it, we have a vector, we have an array. Each slot in the array represents each transaction, is correspond to each transaction and represent whether the transaction needs to be revalidated or executed. And we also keep one index, which is atomic variable, which is a lower bound on the slot in which a transaction needs to be revalidated or executed. Okay, so in order to pick a task, a thread comes and just perform a fetch and add on the index. If the value that it gets, then it takes the value back, goes and reads the appropriate slot and see what is there. If it's empty, then there's nothing to do with this transaction. Okay, so it goes and fetch and add again the index. And in this example, it sees that there is a transaction to validate and it go and takes the task and go and validate it. Now, later, if we want to add validation or execution tasks to this order set, all we need to do is just to mark it in the appropriated slots and pull back the index. Now, in order to keep track of this, what transaction needs to be validated, what transaction needs to be executed, write this array. It's a bit more complicated. The transaction has a life cycle of states, which is go through. So first, it's ready to execute. Ready to execute means that, as it says, it needs to be re-executed. Then executed means that it's ready to be validated. Now, the reason we need also executing and aborting in between is because we need to make sure that at least one transaction, at least one thread can currently execute the transaction and at least one thread can currently aborting the transaction. So this is why we have to sort the races. We want only one execution and one aborting concurrently, at most ones. At least then at most together, it has to be done. In our implementation, we actually compare the log-free and the mutex-based implementation of it and we saw that we can use mutexes without having the performance. This is what we do eventually for the code to be more readable. This is because the fashion increment mechanism is actually provided very good load balancing on these slots. A few other things that I want to mention here is that the collaborative scheduler also need to handle the races between the adding dependencies and taking the dependencies. Also, when we decide that when we see a dependency, there are a few strategies that we can take and one is just to crash and re-execute later. The other one is that when we see a dependency, we just wait for a signal to continue and re-experiment with both of them and there are some trade-offs in performance. Of course, what I explained to you so far is a very high-level intuition and a lot more details in the paper, but I just want to touch very briefly some of the algorithmic optimization to give you some idea. First, we have two older sets. One is for execution and one is for validation. One thing that we want to do is that we want to validate as soon as possible. This will help us to avoid the scales of a board because the sooner we realize that the transaction needs to be revalidated, it also means that all the values it loads are bad and we don't want other transactions to read these values and continue executing. We want everything to just see dependencies and stop when we need to execute things. In order to do it, whenever we see an abort, we already schedule a higher transaction for validation. When we finish the executions, sometimes we need to schedule this validation again. However, we have an optimization here and if this execution doesn't write to any new location, meaning that everything it wrote before, everything it wrote now, it also wrote before, so everything was already estimated in the data structures, then we don't need to revalidate again. Also, we are trying to reduce the index as little as possible, so sometimes we just pass the task around. An execution finishes and instead of pulling back the validation index, if it needs to validate stuff, it just picks a task and starts validating it. At the beginning, I told you that one of the things that make us improve performance is that we can lazily commit the entire block together. We don't track individual commits, and this is how we do it. The collaborative scheduler also needs to keep track of all ongoing execution and validation tasks. Whenever a Fed observes that there is no ongoing execution task and simultaneously, there are no more tasks in the queues, meaning that both indexes are equal to the number of transactions, then it means that all the transactional can be safely committed. And in order to be able to simultaneously verify that these two property holds, we implemented the double-collect technique. As for correctness in the paper, we have a very long and formal proof of both safety and liveness. We basically show that the final state is equivalent to a sequential run of all transactions. And for liveness, we prove that there is no dead lock or live lock. If feds keep taking steps, then they all will terminate. What we show is both two conditions, we saw that if a Fed simultaneously sees these both two conditions, then it's safe to commit. And for liveness, we prove that eventually one Fed will see these conditions and notify the others. Okay, now let's talk about the fun stuff. So we implemented block STM and Rust in both DM and Aptos and merged it to the main benches. And from comparison, we also implemented on the DM code base BOM and LITEM. So for BOM, because BOM needs perfect estimation, we give BOM perfect estimation and we don't measure this time. And LITEM is a recent deterministic STM algorithm. For experiments, we use peer-to-peer transactions, both the standard transaction provided by DM and Aptos. We use two block sizes, 1K and 10K. And we experiment with two 10, 1,000 and 10,000 number of accounts. Note that the number of accounts correspond to the contention level. The more accounts we have, the less conflicts we have and the workload is more parallelizable. In these plots, we can see the results on the DM blockchain with standard peer-to-peer transaction, which consist of, they are not trivial. They consist of 21 reads and four writes. And here is important to see the comparison to BOM. So when the transaction, when the block size is 1K, we're actually better than BOM. Even though we give the BOM estimation for free and we don't charge any time for these, no penalties, we just execute, we just measure how much time it takes BOM to execute with these for free estimations. So we see that our block STM is slightly out to perform. BOM is when the block size is 1K. And this is because BOM needs to recompute the static data structures and it takes time before BOM start executing. And when we increase the block size to 10K, we actually see that BOM out to perform slightly block STM. And this is because the time it takes to recompute the static data structure are now amortized because the block size is bigger. So on this plot, I want to show you the comparison between block STM and sequential execution with different contention level. This was done on the Aptos blockchain with again peer-to-peer transactions, again non-trivial eight reads and five writes. So we see that the blue line, we see that when the contention is low 10,000 accounts, then we can achieve more than 160,000 transaction per second. When the contention is high 100 account, we still get very good numbers. We achieve over a more than 80,000 transaction per second. Now, not less importantly, when we have two accounts, two accounts basically mean that all the transactions have conflict among them and the best we can do is just execute them sequentially. To compare the red line to the black line, the black line is just a sequential execution of the transactions. Then you can see the block STM overhead is very little, which is exactly the goal that we wanted to achieve. We wanted our engine, our parallel engine to be able to dynamically extract the parallelism of every workload and to adapt. Just to conclude, there are a few possible extensions to this work. First, we can consider now nested transactions in order to deal with popular contracts. We can also try and combine block STM with the minor replay approach that they presented in the beginning. Let the minor run the block using block STM, extract the dependency graph and then send it to the other miners. We also didn't optimize our implementation to NUMA or hyper threading, so this is also something that we can do if we want to push the performance further. In general, I want to say that if we think about blockchain performance, so currently we already know that we can speed up the execution. We have a few recent papers, shows how to system, shows how to do it, and how to achieve over the 100 transaction per second. We have at least a few. However, if we want end-to-end performance of over 100 transactions per second, then we still need to improve the storage. We have the consensus, now we have the execution storage is the last thing we need to improve. Now, I probably will be able to do it, and in a very short time we will have a blockchain that will end-to-end run over 100 transactions per second, 100,000 transactions per second. However, if we think further to the future, like a few years ago, a few years from now, then we're talking about like millions transactions per second, then I think the best, we will need to find a very good way to shout the blockchain. This is not an easy problem, and I hope as a research community, I hope that we will be able to come up with some cool ideas and good solutions. Okay, I think I'm almost done with my talk. I just want to mention that we're in Aptos, we are now building a lab, we are hiring people, but more importantly, we are looking forward to where I can look for collaborations. So if you're free, we are really open to collaboration on this project and other projects. Thank you for having me.


Roedd indicateun y chyfe hwyl i ni'r dim ond yn yr Skellin F natur i Llyfr capitolig ac droseg complex momentau unig, rydyn ni argyn يad yn dasbwynt. Felly, annastysg kim y l comida ddany hyn mae yn fawr i brif друзьяu gılıch. Mae薫reid y mynd i'i dd遠 Berasyn, ein y attackerson y stylus heddiw. Y fferwyr Iagwerth m 하지만 wyth o'r rhaglen maen nhw, â tractorig ferwyr i Feirgyll yn Ffergison Marine. mae Llyfrorestol y bydd wedi fidei i am y brofiwr hyny heddiw finding neu llunu i'r trofiwr Erg discrこの newydd. I still believe that the Scottish Government was right to do everything to save Ferguson's shipyard, but for those decisions, Ferguson's shipyard would not still be open, not still employing significant numbers of people as it is today. Douglas Ross and I may well take different views on that, but I do think that it was right for the Scottish Government to protect and save jobs and protect that shipyard. As I set out in questions last week, the delays to the timetable for the construction of those ferries and the cost overruns is a matter of deep regret. The Audit Scotland report published last week set out much of the detail of that, and the Scottish Government, CMAL, is certainly intent on learning all lessons. I do not regret the fact that Ferguson's shipyard is still operational and still employing lots of people. It is good that people continue to be employed. We welcome that, but not a single mention in the First Minister's answer about the island communities that have been waiting for years for lifeline services. That is where the regret should be from this First Minister, but they do not even merit a mention. The deal that she is so proud of has become a disaster, because we now know that the Government waived a crucial safeguard that would have protected taxpayers' money. International guidelines say that the refund guarantee is the financial cornerstone of a shipbuilding project. The guidelines state, and this is a direct quote, that it is unlikely that any shipbuilding contract would be signed if there was no such guarantee. That is exactly what this First Minister did, knowing the risks. Last week, when I asked about the guarantee, she said, and I quote, that decision was clearly taken based on a balance of risks. In other words, she dropped a vital safeguard standard for these types of contracts in order to cut a deal. Five years on, does the First Minister accept that the risks were far too high, and that was a bad deal? First Minister? Firstly, in my initial answer, I expressed deep regret. I think that those were my actual words about the delay in the construction of the ferries and the cost overrun. Clearly, those most impacted by the delay in the construction of the ferries are those who live in our islands. That is where the deep regret rightly lies. My deep regret rightly lies. In terms of the wider question, obviously in terms of the refund guarantee, I set this out in full last week. There, of course, was a failure on the part of FML to offer the full refund guarantee. There were a number of steps taken, as I set out in detail last week, to mitigate the risk that was caused by that. I set out the three key steps in mitigation that were taken. Firstly, changes to the final payment that was to be made to FML for delivery of the vessels was increased from 15 per cent to 25 per cent of the contract price. Effectively, FML therefore withholding more of the payment until the later stage. Secondly, FML to take ownership of all equipment, machinery and materials as they arrived at the shipyard. Thirdly, FML would require all major suppliers to offer the full refund guarantee with FML as the payee. Those were the steps in mitigation that were taken. Then there was a requirement for ministers to take a decision on a balance of judgment. As the paperwork that has been in the public domain now for some time makes clear, the view of FML—FML, of course, did articulate concerns about this, and that is all laid out in the paperwork and in the Audit Scotland report. However, there was also a view that the negotiations with FML had led to the best deal that was capable of being struck with FML. Had that decision not been taken, I express again my deep regret at the delays and the cost overrun in the construction of those ferries. Lessons have been learned and will be learned, but I do not regret the fact that that shipyard still exists and that that shipyard is now employing more than 400 people. As well as learning lessons from this experience, we are also determined to ensure that that shipyard has a bright future. The First Minister stands there and says that lessons have been learned, yet the Audit Scotland report from last week said that there is no evidence that the Scottish Government, Transport Scotland or CML, conducted a formal project review exercise after the original contract failed. That is how you learn lessons, yet her Government did not do it. She could not, despite a very long answer there, accept that that was a bad deal. However, she mentioned CML and its public statements both in the public domain and in the Audit Scotland report. Well, they know that this is a bad deal because they have said, and let's remember, this is a company owned by the Scottish Government. They have said that they would not agree another contract with those conditions. A Government-owned company is saying that. Do you know what else they said in the Audit Scotland report? Regardless of what Scottish Government ministers tell them, they are so opposed to this deal that they can see the pitfalls, even if her Government and her ministers told them that they would not do that. They get how bad this deal is, the First Minister doesn't. It is important to islanders and island communities. Those ferries are vital for their way of life and work, so let's look at what happened here. Nicola Sturgeon signed off a contract against the advice of experts. She started building ferries without agreeing a design. She threw good money after bad, and a quarter of a billion pounds has been spent with nothing to show for it, and worst of all, the person with the ultimate responsibility, the First Minister, removed the essential safeguards that would have protected Scottish taxpayers. A former Scottish Government shipbuilding adviser says that the final cost could rise to between £350 million and £400 million. First Minister, can you guarantee to Scottish taxpayers that that will not be the final bill? First Minister, the chief executive of the shipyard and CML, as I understand it, and this is significant, because this is, I think, the first time that this has happened, have endorsed the latest cost estimates that the finance secretary set out to the chamber last week and the latest updated timescale. These are the cost estimates, and all of the efforts of those in the yard are now ensuring that those ferries are delivered. Douglas Ross says—firstly, I am not standing here and saying that there is not a great deal to deeply regret about the conduct of this contract. That is clearly the case that this has not gone the way anybody would have wanted. Douglas Ross says that there is nothing to show for it. There are, as of this year's middle of March, 462 people in Ferguson's shipyard that have employment. I think that that is something to show for the actions of this Government. We will now get on with learning the lessons. Douglas Ross says that no lessons have been learned. Then, of course, he narrates the lessons that CML has already learned and are putting into practice. We will continue to learn the lessons. Most importantly, we will continue to focus on completing the ferries, which is the most important thing for our island communities. We will also focus on making sure that Ferguson's shipyard and all those who work there now and in the future have that bright future that I think people across Scotland want. I know that the First Minister does not like First Minister's questions because people hold her to account and seek answers, but not even an attempt to give a guarantee that a former Scottish Government adviser says that this will go to £350 million to £400 million, nothing from the First Minister to say in her answer that she would guarantee Scottish taxpayers that that will not happen. What should have been, in the First Minister's own words, a proud achievement has become a sign of this Government's incompetence. The Deputy First Minister, John Swinney, said in 2014 that the SNP would replace 12 ferries with £250 million. They have not even built one for that amount of money. They have ignored the experts and islanders remain stuck with a rotten ferry service with no sign of improvements. Her Government struck a deal on the balance of risks that has been catastrophic for Scottish taxpayers. Any evidence as to why this call was made has mysteriously vanished. Audit Scotland could not find a shred of evidence. It is in their report. Nicola Sturgeon's whole claim here, even after she has lost £250 million without building a single ferry, is that the deal was the best option available. First Minister, are you seriously saying that you would sign the same deal all over again? That was the view at the time that the contract was signed. Obviously, we would not repeat what has happened. I think that that is self-evident. On the issue of the costs, Douglas Ross has quoted, and I know that he is quoting somebody else, costs of between £350 million and £400 million. I simply do not recognise those numbers. The cost estimates are set out by the finance secretary, and those are the cost estimates that we stand behind. I have been very clear about that. Our focus now is on ensuring that those ferries are completed in the interests of our island communities, and on ensuring that Ferguson shipyard and all those who work in it have a bright future. We will learn the lessons from this. I have said several times today that I deeply regret the experience of this, and I am standing here and taking, as I did last week, full responsibility for that. My focus, and the Government's focus, is on learning the lessons and securing the future of that shipyard. The waste of public money, £1.5 billion so far by the Government of Ferguson, does not end with the award of the ferry contract. In August 2019, Tim Hare was appointed as turn-around director at the Yard. Those emails obtained through the freedom information show that the appointment was rushed through without the usual competition in just a few days. Mr Hare was selected from a short list of only three people, all recommended by corporate advisers PricewaterhouseCoopers. In the process of negotiating his salary, he started by offering a rate of £2,000 a day but ended up being paid just under £3,000 per day and expenses, and those emails also show that the First Minister was informed about all of this and did not raise a single objection. As people across Scotland tighten their belts, can the First Minister explain why she thought it was right to pay Tim Hare over £2 million, meaning that he earned in just 11 days what the average Scot earns in a year? Those decisions were taken at the time in line with proper processes and procedures, and people paying the market rates—I do not set the market rates for what people are paid—but we will continue to focus. There is a new chief executive now in place at Ferguson's. He has updated this Parliament on the revised timescales and the revised costs for the ferries, and we will continue to update Parliament and Parliament will continue to hold the Government and the company, which of course is now in Government ownership to account. We will concentrate on learning the lessons, but more than anything, we will concentrate on completing the ferries and on securing a good future for that shipyard, which is something that the STUC has already said is of huge significance and that the Government was right to intervene to secure the future of the shipyard. Anna Sarwar Market rate—£3,000 a day. Were you signing Lionel Messi? Who is the First Minister kidding? I do not hear any apology or any regret for paying this man £2 million. Let us not forget that £2 million was to turn around the yard, but the ferries still are not delivered, are costing more and are delayed again. This email, also found from freedom of information requests, shows that Government advisers suggested that Tim Hare needed a decent pay package so that his life was not, and I quote, unnecessarily painful for him while he swapped Hampshire for Port Glasgow, shocking and out of touch. Families right now are having to count every penny. At the same time, Tim Hare says, and it seems that the First Minister is suggesting that he was value for money. Does the First Minister honestly think that he has been value for money? If not, what is he going to do to recover £2 million of taxpayers' money? I do not think that the experience of this contract has been acceptable in any way, shape or form, but the focus now under the new chief executive of the shipyard is to get the ferries completed in the interests of island communities and to secure the future of the shipyard. That is what the Government is going to focus on. We continue to focus on, and that is in the interests not just of island communities, but in the interests of those who work in that shipyard. We should not lose sight of the fact that, but for Government intervention, this shipyard would no longer be operational, it would no longer be open and there would be nobody employed. Right now, we have more than 400 people employed in that shipyard, and we intend to do everything that we can to ensure that it has a bright future, which I think is what people in Port Glasgow and across Scotland will want to see. We are all for protecting the jobs, but let us be clear that this was a PR stunt to protect Nicola Sturgeon's job, Derek Mackay's job and SNP MP's jobs, because while people see their bills going up, they see a Government paying a quarter of £1 billion and still no ferries. Contracts and jobs going abroad and £2 million paid to one person. This Government and this First Minister is all about spin and PR while the public pay the bill. Nicola Sturgeon is normal and done by the book, but Audit Scotland says the opposite. She says that she is open and transparent, but Audit Scotland does not agree. Nicola Sturgeon says that the delays are unacceptable, but then accepts the delays. She says that she wants to learn lessons, but does not want a public inquiry. She says that the Government takes responsibility, but not a single person has. Why does she think that it is acceptable that, while people need help with the cost of living, they are instead paying the cost of her Government's failure? I do not think that Anna Sarwar really does support the protection and the retention of employment, because if we had followed what he has just set out, there would be no Ferguson shipyard and there would be nobody employed in that shipyard. From the point of public ownership to November 2020, the number of permanent jobs at Ferguson Marine more than doubled has been sustained at a level over 350 permanent staff since then. There are currently around 400 permanent employees and additional agency workers. There have been 42 apprentices learning a trade in that yard since August 2021, and the yard has plans to take on more apprentices later this year. More than 70 per cent of all the people employed live in Inverclyde. Those are people employed right now that would be finding the cost of living crisis much harder had the Government not saved the shipyard. That is the reality. The contract and the experience of that is deeply regrettable. What is not regrettable is saving the shipyard and those who work in it—the jobs of those who work in it. We will now move to supplementary questions, and I call Gordon MacDonald. Thank you, Presiding Officer. In my constituency around the Dreadcor and Redford barracks, there are many MOD family homes that have been left empty for many years. I wrote recently to the Tory Defence Secretary to highlight this issue again. Will the First Minister support my calls for the UK Government to consider the use of hundreds of empty MOD homes in Edinburgh and across Scotland to be used to house people being displaced as a result of Russia's war on Ukraine? The humanitarian crisis in the scale of it means that it is important that all housing options are fully explored. Yes, I think that MOD housing should be considered as part of the process. I would therefore welcome the UK Government, which of course has sole responsibility for MOD property making empty homes available to support displaced people from Ukraine. The Scottish Government is already bringing together key partners to ensure effective co-ordination of plans to address the accommodation needs of people who are settling in Scotland. We are committed to working with all partners to ensure all arrangements in place are safe, sustainable and offer true sanctuary for those fleeing the war. The First Minister will be aware that the war in Ukraine is having an impact on agricultural commodities closely linked to global gas prices. Borders farmers are facing rising costs for inputs, including manufactured fertiliser. The UK Government has announced steps to assist farmers to help to address that uncertainty amongst growers and keep the costs down for farmers. We have not heard anything yet from the SNP Government, so what action is your Government taking to support farmers at this very challenging time? I continue to work with farmers to give whatever support we can, but it is important to point out that, while the impact of the war in Ukraine is obviously being felt on our farming community, that is a community that is also and was already suffering the impacts of Brexit. In many respects, the real responsibility actually does lie with the UK Government. To ask the First Minister what steps the Scottish Government is taking to ensure that international students are not subject to racial profiling when trying to access accommodation in Scotland. Nobody, students nor anybody else should be subject to racial profiling. We would take a very dim view of any evidence that that was happening. I would be very happy to hear more of the information that lies behind the question and look into it if that is necessary, and to consider what action may be necessary as a result of that. The First Minister is aware of the extreme impact of fuel poverty in the western Isles, where 88 per cent of households are not connected to the gas grid. While electricity prices will rise sharply across the whole of Scotland from tomorrow, the price of heating oil has already more than doubled since this time last year, and there is little to no competition within my constituency, leaving consumers without any choice of supplier. Can the First Minister give an assurance that the Scottish Government will continue to make representations to the UK Government to urge them to introduce proper regulation and price caps for the heating oil industry? Yes, I assure Alasdair Allan that we will continue to make representations to the UK Government on what is a very important matter. This is an unregulated market, and the powers to introduce regulation remain with the UK Government. However, the Scottish Government recognises the impact of price increases on off-gas-grid energy consumers, and I am very aware of the severe impacts that fuel poverty has in rural and island communities. We have confirmed that we will continue our fuel insecurity funding to support those struggling with bills, regardless of what fuel they use. We will also continue to provide assistance for households to move away from dependence on heating oil, where a low-carbon alternative is available. This week, we saw the publication of another deeply troubling set of cancer statistics. It revealed that less than 80 per cent of urgent referrals are being treated within the two-month target, shamefully short of the target that is set by the SNP Government. Yet, this is not something for which the SNP Government can use the pandemic as justification. The target has now not been met for almost a decade and is the worst performance since 2008. For all the time, the target remains unmet. Patients and their families are left in limbo. First Minister, what steps will you urgently take to restore 10 years of missed targets? On the issue of cancer waiting times, which is extremely important, there are, as the member will be aware, two key targets. The 31-day target, we actually exceed that target on the 62-day urgent suspicion of cancer referral to treatment target. While, in percentage terms, that target is not being met at the moment—we are working hard to do that—there are actually more people being seen within that target than was the case a year ago and two years ago. We have announced additional funding—£10 million of additional funding—in this year, a further £10 million in the coming financial year, which has a particularly strong focus on colorectal and urology, which are two of the pathways that are having most challenges in terms of waiting times. The initiatives that that funding is supporting include upskilling nurses, investing in diagnostic tests, for example. We have also established three pilot early cancer diagnostic centres and continue to invest in our detect cancer early programme. There is a range of initiatives backed by funding under way, as we seek to ensure that we shorten in particular the waiting time under the 62-day target. It is important to point out that the median weight under that target is 46 days, so the median is obviously well within that. Pam Duncan-Glancy Thank you, Presiding Officer. This week, the RCN reported record vacancies in nursing in Glasgow, and that spending on bank and agency nurses has risen to £76.5 million. This is unsustainable and unacceptable. It means delays and a lack of continuity of care for patients, increased pressure on existing staff and more strain on an already extremely tight budget. Can the First Minister say what new actions the Government will take to address the crisis urgently, because current plans are working? I know that the health secretary also met the RCN yesterday. We have a range of initiatives in place. I have spoken about those in the chamber, as has the health secretary in recent weeks to support recruitment in our national health service, which is very, very challenged at the moment for a variety of reasons that members are well aware of. Overall, though, in Scotland right now, and this excludes vacancies, nursing and midwifery staffing is at a record high. It has increased by 14.5 per cent since this Government took office, NHS staffing overall has increased by more than 20 per cent to a record high since this Government took office. We have record numbers working in our national health service right now, but we want to recruit more. We have targets to recruit more, and that is why we are investing heavily with NHS boards on targeted initiatives to make sure that that recruitment is successful. To ask the First Minister what changes the recent shifts in fossil fuel prices and the need for energy security have made to its plans for decarbonisation. The Scottish Government takes a comprehensive approach to meeting our net zero targets. Our draft energy strategy and just transition plan will consider technologies to transform Scotland's energy system through our heat in buildings programmes. We are driving decarbonisation of homes and buildings and have enhanced support and advice schemes as part of the £1.8 billion investment in this Parliament. The cabinet secretary for net zero and energy recently wrote to the UK Government outlining Scotland's proposals for decarbonisation, including accelerating the electricity network, increasing financial resources for renewables and resolving unfair network charges that are not aligned with net zero. I thank the First Minister for that response. There is urgent need for action. People are facing a cost of living crisis now. Energy bills are going up from tomorrow. All this, while the UK Government seems determined to abandon climate commitments and increase the growing profits of oil and gas companies, a crisis of this nature needs a concerted holistic response. We must deliver at scale measures to help those most in need. We must insulate Scotland, retrofit buildings, invest in low-carbon heating and grow our renewables potential. Can the First Minister outline what the Scottish Government is doing now to supercharge renewables and energy efficiency programmes? What plans are in place to ensure the necessary workforce and skills are in place? Finally, does she agree that the oil and gas companies should not be profiting from the cost of living crisis? We believe and have set out ways in which the UK Government should be doing more to help people right now with the cost of living crisis. We have taken a number of actions ourselves, but the levers and resources in the main lie with the UK Government. We also believe that this is a time to try to accelerate the transition to net zero, not in any way to move off that ambition. As I said in my earlier answer, we have extensive plans in place across the energy sector to meet those targets. That includes, for example, investing £100 million in the hydrogen sector, boosting support for households to improve their own energy efficiency and to transition away from fossil fuel heating. We have our green jobs workforce academy supporting existing employees to undertake necessary upskilling and re-skilling to secure green jobs opportunities. We have also called on the UK Government for an extended windfall tax on organisations, including oil and gas companies, that are making significant profits right now. Of course, our most recent budget sets out record levels of investment to address the climate emergency and deliver a just transition to net zero. Will the First Minister welcome the 11 per cent reduction in emissions from North Sea operations achieved? Does she agree that more gas produced here in the UKCS means less imported LNG, cutting emissions by nearly 300 per cent? Should we in Scotland not be in the lead on decarbonising opportunities offshore wind to power platforms, hydrogen technology and carbon capture storage, which the climate change panel says is vital to get to net zero? Does she recognise in conclusion that, without a thriving oil and gas sector, Scotland may simply lose these major opportunities to lead on net zero because it is their skills, their technical expertise and their operational experience that are essential to deliver them? I certainly welcome the efforts of the oil and gas sector to decarbonise their own activities. I think that is something that we should all welcome. Of course, we have to also think about the impact on the environment of the use of oil and gas. That is an important part of getting to net zero as well. I do agree and have made clear my agreement that the skills, the expertise and indeed the infrastructure of the oil and gas sector will be extremely important in making sure that we make that transition to renewable and low-carbon sources of energy. We need to make that transition as quickly as possible for a variety of reasons. The importance of that has been underlined in recent weeks, but we need to do that fairly and justly as well. When he was a minister with those responsibilities, Fergus Ewing played a really important role in helping to ensure that the Government is on the right track. Nobody wants to increase dependence on imports of oil and gas, but we must therefore ensure that we are investing properly in the transition to renewables, and that is what this Government is seeking to do. First Minister, you just said that nobody wants to increase dependency on imports, but reports this week suggest that, without political backing, the UK could be wholly dependent on imports of oil and gas within 15 years due to a lack of confidence to invest. Given that the cambo field is priced in to the climate change committee's next zero projections for decarbonisation, could it help to reduce the cost of energy bills and create around 4,000 jobs, and would significantly help the UK's energy security, will the First Minister consider giving her political backing to production from cambo? I have made clear my views on cambo. I think that they are well-known and well-reported. I am not the decision maker on cambo, but I have made my views clear on that. I think that everybody accepts, even the member's colleagues in the UK Government accepts the importance of moving away from reliance on fossil fuels as quickly as possible, but that we need to do that justly. The question is how we best do that, and of course a significant proportion of what is produced in the North Sea right now is exported right now. We need to invest more in renewables and low-carbon sources of energy. As Fergus Ewing rightly has said, we need to invest in carbon capture and storage, and it is again regrettable that the UK Government has not prioritised the Scottish cluster, the ACORN project there. That is inescapable, and the war in Ukraine has just reminded us of how important it is to transition away from fossil fuels. There will be differences of opinion about how we best do that, but it is inescapable that we do that, and for this Government the investment in and support of renewables is a crucial part of it. To ask the First Minister what the Scottish Government anticipates, the impact will be of the register of persons holding a controlled interest in land, which will launch on 1 April. This new public register will increase transparency around land management and ownership. It will be held by registers of Scotland and free to access. It will provide information about those who ultimately make decisions about the management or use of land, even if they are not registered as the owner. In short, it will mean those who are in control of the land, who are taking the decisions about the use of the land, are not able to effectively hide their identities because they are not the registered owner. It will include overseas entities and trusts irrespective of when the land was acquired, and the information will enable individuals and communities to identify and engage with those who make decisions about land that affect them. It marks a significant milestone in making land ownership in Scotland more transparent, which is a key objective for the Scottish Government's land reform ambitions. I thank the First Minister for her answer and welcome this legislation. To put this in practical terms, the First Minister will be aware that in many small towns such as Galashales, in my constituency, the town centres are blighted by many long-term, vacant large retail outlets, but the actual owners of land wars cannot be traced, preventing organisations such as Energised Galashales and indeed the local authority redeveloping the town centre, either through voluntary or indeed compulsory purchase. Is this the type of difficulty that the legislation will at long last help resolve? One of the issues that the register will help to resolve is, as I said earlier on, the main purpose of it is to improve transparency so that the public have information about people who are actually making the decisions about use of land, wherever that land is, regardless of who owns or who is the registered owner of it. Anyone, including local authorities, who wants to contact the person who controls or influences those decisions, will be able to use the register to find the contact details where they are on the register. That will make it easier for communities to find and contact those who control land and property and then influence the decisions about the land and property that impact on them or their communities. Question 5, Graham Simpson. To ask the First Minister what immediate improvements the Scottish Government plans to deliver for passengers when it takes control of ScotRail on 1 April. The transition of ScotRail passenger services into public ownership tomorrow will be a very significant milestone. It will also fulfil a manifesto commitment of this Government and mark a new beginning for ScotRail. It provides an opportunity to modernise and deliver passenger services that are efficient, sustainable, safe, fit for the future and reflect the changing world that we live in. Obviously, from tomorrow, services will continue as normal. It is important that we provide reassurance and familiarity to passengers in the immediate term as we recover from the disruption and impact of the pandemic. Later this spring, we will launch a national conversation offering rail, staff, passengers and communities an opportunity to contribute to the future vision for Scotland railway and help shape this new beginning for ScotRail. Thank you. We know that the SNP is no good at running things. You just have to look at the ferries for that. Given that fiasco, rail passengers should be worried that that rail will turn out to be CalMac on wheels. On Sunday, Transport Minister Jenny Gilruth was quoted as saying, from day one, you might not necessarily see anything that looks different, but the major difference is accountability. Ms Gilruth obviously did not get the memo that this Government does not do accountability. So far, what we do know is that we are going to have rising fares, service cuts and ticket office closures. What part of that is an improvement? The Government has already delivered significant improvements on our railways. That is even before the railway comes into public ownership, as it will tomorrow. I know that the Conservatives like being reminded of that, so I am going to deliver again on that. Since 2009, under this Government, the communities of Allawa, Lawrence Kirk, Armadale, Black Ridge, Calder Croats, Conningbridge, Shoffair, Eskbank, Newton-Grange, Gorebridge, Stowe, Gallashale, Tweedbank and Cintor, all reconnected to the rail network through the reversal of cuts. In the next three years, Reston, East Linton, Dahlcros, Cameronbridge and Leven will follow. Railway workers in England, under the Tories, faced a pay freeze. Fair pay deal was delivered in October last year for ScotRail staff. Lastly, we have taken action to keep rail fares down. ScotRail fares are on average 20 per cent cheaper than in those areas of the UK that are governed by the Conservatives. The public ownership of ScotRail is very welcome to all reasonable members in this place and to the public at large. Does the First Minister think that that will increase opportunities for the railway and it will better serve Scotland's people and economy? Yes, I do. Bringing ScotRail into public ownership and control is a historic moment, and I am delighted that it is happening under this Government. Many others, including the rail unions campaign for this to happen, and I think that it is important to pay tribute to them as well. Our commitment is clear. We have invested £9 billion in the railway since 2007. I have just listed the stations that have been reconnected since 2009, with five more to follow. Of course, we have delivered a pay deal for staff in contrast a pay freeze south of the border. We will continue to press for full devolution of rail powers, including full devolution of network rail in Scotland, so that we can then truly deliver the railway that Scotland wants and deserves. To ask the First Minister whether the Scottish Government will provide an update on what the £10 million long Covid support fund has been allocated for and how much has been spent. First Minister, services and support are already being provided across Scotland for those with long Covid. We know more is needed, not just now, but also for the long term to support people in the most appropriate way. Our long Covid strategic network brings together clinical experts, NHS boards and those with lived experience and will determine how we target the support fund at the areas where additional resource is needed and can make the biggest difference in the long term. The first tranche of funding will be allocated over the coming weeks, the next few weeks. That will be used by boards to strengthen the co-ordination of services across supported self-management primary care, rehabilitation support and secondary care investigation and support. Jackie Baillie Can I thank the First Minister for her response, but long Covid sufferers describe there being very few services in place? This funding was announced in September 2021. No indication was given at that stage that it would be six months later and not one penny of money has been allocated to health boards to develop services. Instead, as we have heard, the money is going to be spread over the next three years, with numbers of those suffering from long Covid estimated by the UNS to be 119,000 and rising. Why has the pace been so slow? Can the First Minister indicate that when every health board in Scotland will have dedicated long Covid services to help patients and their GPs? We set up, as I indicated in my initial answer, the long Covid strategic network. That was deliberately so that the targeting of that funding would be driven and determined by clinical experts on the front line and by those with lived experience of long Covid. In addition to that, we have already launched a long Covid information platform to help people to manage symptoms. We have done work to raise awareness of long Covid and signpost people to appropriate support. NHS Scotland is already delivering care in line with the recommendations of the clinical guidelines that are developed by NICE, for example. Of course, that is underpinned in Scotland already by the full range of NHS services, including primary care teams, community-based rehab services and referrals to secondary care where necessary. Long Covid clinics are one model that NHS boards may consider already, but no one single approach is going to fit all the areas and circumstances, so we will continue to support the development of multidisciplinary support services, because that is something that will be required for the long term. Long Covid is becoming the biggest mass disabling event since World War I. Nearly 120,000 sufferers need clinics, care pathways and long Covid nurses, but we are still nowhere. I have asked the First Minister about this every month since the funding was announced in September, and she said that an action plan was being implemented. Six months on, and we have just learned that not one penny has left the Scottish Government bank account of that £10 million. I ask the First Minister if she will now apologise to Scotland's long Covid sufferers, if she will wake up her ministers on this issue and get help to sufferers fast. No, I won't, because we continue to support the development of services that are appropriate for those who will need this support, not just now, but in the long term. This has already been underpinned by the full range of NHS support services. I have outlined the work that has already been done, and I have outlined why we took the decision to allow clinical experts and those who are living with long Covid to direct the nature of the funding that is being made available. I have been encouraged in this chamber to follow the example allegedly that is being taken south of the border. There was a report published just last week, I think, by the all-party parliamentary group on Covid there, stating that the pathways established by the UK Government, including long Covid clinics, do not meet the demand and that some of these clinics may be experienced in temporary or even permanent closures. The reason we are doing it in the way that we are is so that we are not somehow suggesting that there is one single model. This is support that needs to be delivered across the entirety of the NHS. Of course, we still need to understand more about the nature of long Covid, which is why the chief scientist's office is also funding right now nine Scottish-led research projects in order that we can continue to develop our understanding and ensure that services develop alongside that. To ask the First Minister what immediate safeguarding measures will be in place to ensure that arrivals from Ukraine are protected from organised criminal activity, human trafficking and exploitation? Any form of human trafficking or exploitation is abhorrent. People must be protected from it. Police Scotland's national human trafficking unit continues to engage with internal and external partners and enforcement agencies to maintain a very high visibility of human trafficking and exploitation risks at points of entry around Scotland. Anyone with concerns about human trafficking should contact Police Scotland. In terms of safeguarding, where people are opening their homes to displace people from Ukraine, hosts can apply for expedited disclosure checks of the same level of scrutiny as the initial checks carried out for those working with children and vulnerable adults. That is under the new regulations introduced last week to ensure that we have in place a safe, speedy and free vetting system. I thank the First Minister. I think that we all thank the huge number of Scottish families who have come forward to open their homes to the Ukrainians who are coming here through the UK-wide scheme, but we also have to be realistic that, sadly, not everyone who offers help will be well-intentioned. In fact, organised criminal gangs may see what is happening in Ukraine as more of an opportunity than a tragedy. A number of very important organisations, including Tara, survivors of human trafficking in Scotland and Scotland Against Modern Slavery, have always quite valid concerns about the vulnerability and desperation of those arriving, and the real potential for harm posed by luring arrivals into low-paid, illegally or sexually exploitative activities. They are even worse than simply being abused in private homes. I can ask the First Minister what work will be undertaken by the Government and its public agencies to adequately vet, prepare and educate host families before the arrival of those who are coming to Scotland. After they have arrived and settled, what on-going safeguards will be in place in the medium to long-term to ensure that we are tracking, tracing and monitoring both the wellbeing and the safety of those who have resettled in Scotland to make sure that none of them, absolutely none of them, are being exploited in any way whatsoever? This is a really important issue and we are designing and have been designing support services that make sure appropriate safeguarding is in place, but also that we take account and the partners we are working with can take account of the on-going wellbeing needs of those who come to Scotland. Disclosure checks are an important part of that, but having that multi-agency approach to make sure that people get the support that they need not just on arrival and when they are first being accommodated, but throughout the time that they may be in Scotland. One of the reasons for us agreeing the super-sponsor route with the UK Government is so that we could have an approach that gets people to Scotland quickly, then temporarily accommodates them while in a slightly slower time we put in place all of the wider support and do all of the appropriate checks. We have support arrangements already in place, starting with the welcome hubs that have been established. The big hold-up at the moment, and I say this, we are working constructively with the UK Government to try to resolve this. I met Michael Gove earlier this week on this particular issue. We have the super-sponsor route and we have the support in place. We are being held up at the moment by the slow pace of the granting of visas. That is what I know the UK Government is seeking to speed up. I hope that that happens quickly so that we can start to welcome significant numbers of people to Scotland with all of the support that Jamie Greene rightly identifies as being vital for them. That concludes First Minister's questions. There will be a brief pause before we move on to members' business.