Hardware Requirements

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This is a team contributed page

Below are the hardware requirements for running a Node and Gateway. Unlike during BetaNet, the Node and Gateway must be on separate machines it is highly recommended on separate networks.

Node

Nodes are high-powered machines that use both a CPU and GPU. The software does support full CPU Nodes, but a higher core count is required. In addition, as the software becomes more mature and more power is extracted from the GPU, the hardware requirements for such Nodes will likely increase.

CPU

High core count modern CPU

Capable of meeting a multithreaded PassMark score of 15,500 or a Cinebench R5 multi score of 1,750.
Examples: AMD Ryzen 7 2700x, AMD Ryzen 5 3600x, Intel Core i9-9980HK
GPU

Nvidia Turing: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 or greater

Nvidia Ampere: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti or greater

RAM

16 GB DDR4 or more

An upgrade path to 32 GB is recommended.
Storage

1 TB high-speed enterprise NVMe (PCI) SSD

Recommended speed: 500,000/500,000 IOPS
Recommended reliability: 1.5 million hours MTBF
Example: Samsung 970 PRO SSD 1TB – M.2 NVMe
Bandwidth 100 Mbps upload / 100 Mbps download
Increased bandwidth will likely result in faster round times and possibly increased compensation.
IP Address Static IP address recommended.
Using a dynamic IP address with dynamic DNS is also supported.

Turing or Ampere GPU Requirement

The xx network requires an Nvidia Turing or Ampere GPU due to upgrades to the microarchitecture of the shaders, granting an order of magnitude increase in performance for the specific workloads used. In addition, the mul units have been increased to 32 bits, which significantly increases the speed of the modular exponentiation and modular multiplication, which are some of the core cryptographic operations of the cMix protocol.

Gateway

Gateways require relatively low-powered machines. Every Node must have a Gateway.

The role of the Gateway is to be the Node’s “public face.” As such, it needs to be generally available; bandwidth and latency are hugely important.

To achieve this, the team highly recommends that the Gateway be hosted on a VPS or in a colocation center to ensure global access. Regardless of the configuration, it is recommended that a Gateway has a low latency link to their Node, preferably below 50 milliseconds with a maximum of 100 milliseconds.

Recommended Configuration

CPU

Four core modern CPU, cloud deployment recommended

Example: AMD Ryzen 3 2200G
GPU Not required
RAM 8 GB or more
Storage

500 GB SSD (minimum SATA / preferred NVMe)

Used for database instances.
Bandwidth 100 Mbps upload / 100 Mbps download
Latency Recommended: 50 milliseconds or less between the Node and Gateway

Required: 100 milliseconds or less between the Node and Gateway

IP Address Static IP address required.
Using a dynamic IP address with dynamic DNS is also supported.

Gateway Recommended VPSes

The team has researched VPSes at a variety of commonly used providers. The following should meet the requirements. Please research what is available in your geographic region before making a decision.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) c5.xlarge (~$122/month)
Microsoft Azure F4s v2 (~$121/month)
Google Cloud c2-standard-4 (~$80/month)
TransIP X8 + SSD space (~$77/month)
Hetzner CPX31 + SSD space (~$45.50/month)
Contabo VPS 700 ($11/month) or VPS M SSD + SSD space (~$12/month)

Alternate Gateway Configurations

It has come to the team’s attention that VPS solutions with acceptable latency are prohibitively expensive for many Node operators. There are alternative configurations that should be viable for at least the beginning of MainNet. However, it is likely that as the network matures, these configurations will not be sufficient.

Gateways Hosted Residentially or Commercially on a Separate Line from the Node

In the event that a Node operator cannot secure a VPS, the next best configuration is to have it hosted on a physical machine with a separate internet connection from this Node. This configuration would be best at two separate physical locations but can be at the same physical location.

Gateways Hosted Residentially or Commercially on the same Line as the Node

It is possible to host the Gateway on the same LAN as the Node. However, this configuration does limit the security provided by the Gateway because, in the event that the Gateway is inundated with requests, it could limit the available bandwidth for the Node. Furthermore, in this configuration, all clients will know the IP of the Node because it would be the same as the advertised Gateway IP.

Under such a configuration, the minimum requirement for the joint connection would be:

Joint Bandwidth 200 Mbps upload / 200 Mbps download

Unsupported Configurations

Within the BetaNet, a common configuration was to host the Gateway and Node on the same machine. This configuration is NOT supported within the ProtoNet or MainNet.

Configurations and the MainNet Transition Program

At network launch, the MainNet Transition Program will accept applications with all configurations listed above. As the network matures, the program may adapt its requirements if necessary for network performance or stability.