Proof Generation Requirements
We recommend that for any production benchmarking, you use the prover network to estimate latency and costs of proof generation.
Local Proving
If you want to generate SP1 proofs locally, this section has an overview of the hardware requirements required. These requires depend on which types of proofs you want to generate and can also change over time as the design of the zKVM evolves.
The most important requirement is CPU for performance/latency and RAM to prevent running out of memory.
| Mock / Network | Core / Compress | PLONK (EVM) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | 1+, single-core perf matters | 16+, more is better | 32+, more is better |
| Memory | 8GB+, more is better | 32GB+, more if you have more cores | 64GB+ (for PLONK) |
| Disk | 20GB+ | 20GB+ | 100GB+ (for trusted setup) |
| EVM Compatible | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ |
CPU
The execution & trace generation of the zkVM is mostly CPU bound, having a high single-core performance is recommended to accelerate these steps. The rest of the prover is mostly bound by hashing/field operations which can be parallelized with multiple cores.
Memory
Our prover requires keeping large matrices (i.e., traces) in memory to generate the proofs. Certain steps of the prover have a minimum memory requirement, meaning that if you have less than this amount of memory, the process will OOM.
This effect is most noticeable when using the PLONK prover, which requires around 128GB of RAM to generate a proof. We use PLONK to avoid having to perform a trusted setup, which other SNARKs like Groth16 require. We have future optimizations planned to reduce the memory requirements of the PLONK prover substantially.
Disk
Disk is required to install the SP1 zkVM toolchain and to install the trused setup artifacts, if you plan to locally build the PLONK prover.
Furthermore, disk is used to checkpoint the state of the program execution, which is required to generate the proofs.