BladeBit Chia Plotter

A high-performance k32-only, Chia (XCH) plotter supporting in-RAM and disk-based plotting.

Requirements

GPU (CUDA) Plotter Requirements

Supported system configurations for alpha:

OS	Windows and Linux
Memory	256GB of system DRAM
GPUs	NVIDIA GPUs with CUDA capability 5.2 and up with at least 8GB of vRAM

See https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus for compatible GPUs.

In-RAM

416 GiB of RAM are required to run it, and a few more megabytes for stack space and small allocations.

64-bit is supported only, for obvious reasons.

Disk-based

A minimum of 4 GiB of RAM is required, with lower bucket counts requiring up to 12 GiB of RAM.

Around 480 GiB of total temporary space is required when plotting to disk in the default mode, or around 390 GiB with --alternate mode enabled.

The exact amounts of RAM and disk space required may vary slightly depending on the system's page size and the target disk file system block size (block-alignment is required for direct I/O).

SSDs are highly recommended for disk-based plotting.

Prerequisites

Linux, Windows and MacOS (both intel and ARM (Apple Silicon)) are supported.

Linux

Install the following packages:

# CentOS or RHEL-based
sudo yum group install -y "Development Tools"
sudo yum install -y cmake gmp-devel numactl-devel

# Ubuntu or Debian-based
sudo apt install -y build-essential cmake libgmp-dev libnuma-dev

Windows

Must have at least Visual Studio 2019 or its build tools installed.

macOS

Must have Xcode or Xcode build tools installed. brew install cmake

Optionally install gmp: brew install gmp

Building

# Clone the repo & its submodules
git clone https://github.com/Chia-Network/bladebit.git && cd bladebit

# Create a build directory for cmake and cd into it
mkdir -p build && cd build

# Generate config files & build
cmake ..
cmake --build . --target bladebit --config Release

The resulting binary will be found under the build/ directory. On Windows it will be under build/Release/.

Usage

Run bladebit with the -h for complete usage and command line options:

# Linux & macOS
build/bladebit -h

# Windows
build/Release/bladebit.exe -h

The bladebit CLI uses the format bladebit <GLOBAL_OPTIONS> <sub_command> <COMMAND_OPTIONS>.

Use the aforementioned -h parameter to get the full list of sub-commands and GLOBAL_OPTIONS. The sub_command-specific COMMAND_OPTIONS can be obtained by using the help sub command with the desired command as the parameter:

bladebit help ramplot
bladebit help diskplot

In-RAM

Basic ramplot usage:

# OG plots
./bladebit -f <farmer_public_key> -p <pool_public_key> ramplot <output_directory>

# Portable plots
./bladebit -f <farmer_public_key> -c <pool_contract_address> ramplot <output_directory>

Disk-Based

Basic diskplot usage:

# OG plots
./bladebit -f <farmer_public_key> -p <pool_public_key> diskplot -t1 <temp_directory> <output_directory>

# Portable plots
./bladebit -f <farmer_public_key> -c <pool_contract_address> diskplot -t1 <temp_directory> <output_directory>

# Differing temp directories:
./bladebit -f ... -c ... diskplot -t1 /path/to/temp_1 -t2 /path/to/temp2 /my/output/dir

# With a 100 GiB temp2 cache and alternating mode
./bladebit -f ... -c ... diskplot -a --cache 100G -t1 /path/to/temp_1 -t2 /path/to/temp2 /my/output/dir

# With fine-grained thread control depending on the workload
./bladebit -f ... -c ... diskplot --f1-threads 12 --fp-threads 32 -t1 /path/to/temp_1  /my/output/dir

License

Licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. See LICENSE.

Copyright 2023 Harold Brenes, Chia Network Inc