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Version: v6 (Hypercube)

Optimize Your Prover

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We are actively seeking partnerships with teams interested in building competitive provers on the prover network. Learn more here.

If you want to be a competitive prover on the network, you'll need to do a lot more than just run the reference implementation. Here's what you need to know:

Multi-GPU Parallelization​

The reference implementation doesn't use multiple GPUs, which means you won't hit the SDK's latency targets. Competitive provers regularly utilize 20-40 GPUs per proving request to maximize throughput. This requires:

  • Writing custom code to split proving work across multiple GPUs
  • Coordinating the RISC-V executor across the GPU cluster
  • Creating checkpoints of the virtual machine state
  • Distributing execution artifacts to different GPUs for parallel proving
  • Orchestrating the recursion prover to combine sharded proofs into a single final proof

Cost-Effective GPU Infrastructure​

Running on AWS or GCP will probably eat up all your profits. You'll need to get creative:

  • Build autoscaling infrastructure for on-demand GPU usage
  • Source long-term GPU reservations from alternative cloud providers
  • Buy GPUs in bulk directly from suppliers

Software and Hardware Optimizations​

The prover is primarily bottlenecked by three operations: hashing, field operations, and memory access. You'll need to optimize at both the software and hardware levels:

Software Optimizations​

  • Optimize assembly of field operations and hashing, commonly used primitives in prover
  • Use AVX256/512/NEON to vectorize certain operations
  • Optimize memory usage and memory access to minimize cache misses

GPU Optimizations​

  • Identify massively parallel parts of the prover, such as merkle tree root calculation, quotient calculation and implement CUDA kernels for them
  • Optimize memory transfer between CPU and GPU

Hardware Optimizations​

  • Source cheap CPU/GPU hardware that is most cost effective and efficient on latency
  • Use more advanced hardware such as FPGA/ASICs to accelerate the prover

Reliability and Performance Monitoring​

You'll need to invest in robust monitoring and testing to ensure your prover is running at maximum capacity and reliability.

  • Robustly test your proving node to ensure you miss deadlines on proofs as rarely as possible
  • Integrate extensive monitoring, metrics collection, healthchecks, and paging to ensure your provers are running at maximum capacity and reliability
  • Benchmark your performance against other provers on the network