Hardware

See suggested hardware configuration here.

• CPU Recommendations

  • We recommend a CPU with the highest number of cores as possible. AMD Threadripper or Intel Server (Xeon) CPUs are fine.

  • We recommend AMD Threadripper as you get a larger number of cores for parallelization compared to Intel.

  • Threadripper also has a cost-per-core advantage and a greater number of PCIe lanes compared to the equivalent Intel part. PoH (Proof of History) is based on sha256 and Threadripper also supports sha256 hardware instructions.

• SSD size and I/O style (SATA vs NVMe/M.2)
 for a validator

  • Minimum example - Samsung 860 Evo 2TB

  • Mid-range example - Samsung 860 Evo 4TB

  • High-end example - Samsung 860 Evo 4TB

• GPUs

  • Validator nodes will be required to run with GPUs starting at Stage 1 of Tour de SOL. Without GPUs, a validator will not be able to catch up to the ledger once the network is launched. GPUs are NOT required for validators during Stage 0/Dry Runs of Tour de SOL.

  • What kind of GPU?

    • We recommend Nvidia 2080Ti or 1080Ti series consumer GPU or Tesla series server GPUs.

    • We do not currently support OpenCL and therefore do not support AMD GPUs. We have a bounty out for someone to port us to OpenCL. Interested? Check out our GitHub.​

• Power Consumption

  • Approximate power consumption for a validator node running an AMD Threadripper 2950W and 2x 2080Ti GPUs is 800-1000W.

Software

• We build and run on Ubuntu 18.04. Some users have had trouble when running on Ubuntu 16.04

• See Connecting Your Validator for the current Solana software release.