Thank you to all the members of the community who took the time to speak with us about barriers and difficulties in participating in the xx network. We have learned a great deal about what hardware is available across the globe and what configurations community members can support.
Ultimately, it is the participation of the Nodes which ensures the network will be successful, so we have moved to giving hardware benchmarks instead of component requests.
As a result of feedback, we have removed the requirement for a static IP address and have added guidance on running the Gateway on the same hardware as the Node. We have also given better explanations for potential risks in choosing less performant or reliable hardware.
Node:
CPU: High core count modern CPU with Hyperthreading
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Capable of meeting Multithreaded PassMark score of 15,500 or Cinebench R15 Multi Score score of 1750
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Examples: AMD Ryzen 7 2700x, AMD Ryzen 5 3600, Intel Core i9-9980HK
GPU: Nvidia Turing or Tesla GPU, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 or greater
RAM: 16GB DDR4 or more (an upgrade path to 32GB is recommended)
Storage: 1TB High Speed Enterprise NVME (PCI) SSD
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Recommended speed: 500,000 /500,000 IOPS
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Recommended Reliability: 1.5 million hours MTBF
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Example: Samsung 970 PRO SSD 1TB - M.2 NVMe
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Note: SSD reliability is not as important for the BetaNet when there will not be a large number of transitions. It is likely that lower endurance SSDs will be fine but will need to be replaced when it comes time for MainNet. If an SSD fails, it could take substantial time before a node is able to get back online.
Bandwidth: 100mbit up / 100mbit down
Other configurations may also work and will be approved on a case by case basis. The software does support full CPU nodes, but higher core counts are required. As the software becomes more mature and more power is extracted from the GPU, it is likely the hardware requirements for such nodes will increase.
We are actively testing setups with multiple high end (5+) Nvidia Pascal GPUs and expect to report in the next few weeks if such setups can meet requirements. That being said, it is likely that support will be dropped from such configurations as the platform matures.
Gateway:
For the BetaNet, it will be possible to run a Gateway on a Node, see below.
Gateways are low powered machines which act as the public face for a node. Every node must have a gateway. Most gateways are expected to run in the cloud, but it is possible to run them as physical devices. They offer protection to the node if they are on a seperate IP address and network connection.
CPU: modern dual core (Example: AMD Ryzen 3 2200g)
GPU: None
RAM: 2GB or more
Storage: 250GB (database instance)
Bandwidth: 100mbit up / 100mbit down (separate from node bandwidth)
Node + Gateway:
It is possible to run the Gateway on the node, although it results in a loss of security. The gateway structure makes it more difficult to take a node off the network, which will be lost if it is run on the same machine. The specifications for such a node differ slightly and are as follows:
CPU: High core count modern CPU with Hyperthreading
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Capable of meeting Multithreaded PassMark score of 15,500 or Cinebench R15 Multi Score score of 1750
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Examples: AMD Ryzen 7 2700x, AMD Ryzen 5 3600, Intel Core i9-9980HK
GPU: Nvidia Turing or Tesla GPU, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 or greater
RAM: 16GB DDR4 or more (an upgrade path to 32GB is recommended)
Storage 1: 1TB High Speed Enterprise NVME (PCI) SSD
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Recommended speed: 500,000 /500,000 IOPS
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Recommended Reliability: 1.5 million hours MTBF
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Example: Samsung 970 PRO SSD 1TB - M.2 NVMe
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Note: SSD reliability is not as important for the BetaNet when there will not be a large number of transitions. It is likely that lower endurance SSDs will be fine but will need to be replaced when it comes time for MainNet. If an SSD fails, it could take substantial time before a node is able to get back online.
Storage 2: 240GB High Speed Enterprise SSD
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Recommended speed: 100,000/10,000 IOPS
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Recommended Reliability: 1.5 million hours MTBF
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Example: Samsung 883 DCT 240GB
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Note: SSD reliability is not as important for the BetaNet when there will not be a large number of transitions. It is likely that lower endurance SSDs will be fine but will need to be replaced when it comes time for MainNet.
Bandwidth: 150mbit up / 200mbit down
These specifications may change over the life of the BetaNet, but we will strive to keep them as consistent as possible. Please note these specifications are highly likely to change going into the MainNet.