Filecoin explains testnet mining configuration: Although GPU is used to calculate SNARKs, the computing power is still calculated based on hard disk space

According to BlockBeats, Filecoin published an article on its official website on December 10, detailing the mining configuration requirements for its testnet phase. Officials said that if users choose to purchase hardware to conduct mining tests on the testnet, it is recommended to purchase computing hardware that supports sealing 32GiB sectors, and the disk space must be at least 512 GiB. According to BlockBeats' previous report, the Filecoin testnet is expected to go online before 2 a.m. on December 12.

If users want to mine on the Filecoin testnet, Filecoin officially recommends purchasing computers that support 32GiB sectors. The testnet currently temporarily supports 1GiB test sectors, and miners can join mining at any time. However, because 1GiB sectors are too small to be used on the mainnet, the testnet will be forked and upgraded in the future to increase the sector size. Officials recommend that testnet miners provide at least 512GiB of hard disk space, and this number will be upgraded after the mainnet is launched. If miners are only interested in storage mining, they may not need such a large space, but it will affect future income and block rewards in the future.

The official also gave the configuration of the "Proof of Replication" miner. This work requires a powerful CPU and a large amount of memory space and hard disk space to "flip data", so the official recommends an 8-core processor, 128GB internal test, and 512GB SSD. The SNARK algorithm used by Filecoin consumes a lot of memory space, and the GPU also needs to be powerful enough to calculate SNARKs efficiently and quickly. Currently, Filecoin's lotus deployment plan is designed for Nvidia GPUs, and support for other GPU manufacturers will be added in the future.

BlockBeats also learned that "Proof of Spacetime" requires a lot of hard disk space. The official team's self-test currently requires 1.5TB of hard disk space. The speed and efficiency of packaging sectors will affect the number of votes and rewards in the Filecoin ElectionPost campaign. According to the official self-test, after obtaining votes, the block is packaged and the time for calculating SNARKs each time does not exceed 20 seconds.

Officials also warned miners that participating in network mining requires maintaining network stability. Otherwise, after multiple failed submissions of time-space proofs, the block rewards will be reduced and the risk of being punished by Slash will increase.

It should be noted that Filecoin mining does not use GPUs for PoW algorithm mining. The computing power of miners is determined by the storage space they can provide to the network, rather than the efficiency of GPU computing SNARKs. The more client data a Filecoin miner stores, the greater the storage capacity of the miner. More storage capacity on the network means that a specific miner is more likely to generate blocks and win block rewards. Miners can choose whether to participate in storage power consensus, storage mining, and/or retrieval mining. Filecoin stated that the standard test configuration for the Filecoin mainnet may change, so the configuration announced this time may not be the final version.

BlockBeats also saw such a reference configuration on the Filecoin Lotus deployment developer page. This type of configuration may be directly used for mainnet mining:

3TB hard drive (packaged in 32GiB sectors)

8-12 core processor

256GB RAM

256GB NVMe Swap (to prevent problems with memory mining)

Nvidia GTX 1060 or above GPU

Original address: https://filecoin.io/blog/filecoin-testnet-mining/

Lotus deployment tutorial: https://docs.lotu.sh/en+hardware-mining