Bacalhau project report 20220909
There are two major efforts that we did design & planning work on this week:
- prototyping the future verification protocol
- replacing the transport with a smart contract
Our next big project is to build our own simulation of a possible universe of bacalhau nodes with wallets. The goal is to introduce a bad actor and reliably see their wallet balance go to zero. We plan to have excellent visualization tools of the simulation, and debugging tools that can trace the path of a single message.
There will be a central in-memory API which acts as a message bus and wallet balances, and multiple competing clients, acting as nodes, trying to trick eachother into losing money. The central API server would eventually be the smart contract, and the nodes real executors, but for now we will fake everything so that we can quickly and easily simulate the system. The goal is not to write any tests yet but to have a system we can rapidly experiment with to run simulations and observe the results. The competing clients can collude with eachother in groups, and we should set up scenarios via the clients being driven by cli instantiations and scripting those. We will version controlling the scenarios we're running and keeping an experiment log. The goal of the different client groups should be to be self interested (game theoretic) agents.
Kai is working on setting up the dev stack for replacing the transport with a smart contract. To begin with, we are going to start developing the smart contract in Solidity, because FVM will support EVM contracts, with Hardhat as a dev stack that will run alongside the existing Bacalhau devstack.
Kai is working on brain-dumping a lot of the knowledge he has in his head into our docs :-)
We recorded two new demos:
We are working on deploying 4 large nodes on the production network so that Caltech can run some CPU benchmarks before moving some workloads onto Bacalhau. These servers are geographically located closely to Caltech (in Oregon) and have the following nice and beefy specs:
- Dual AMD Epyc 7402 - 48c/96t - 2.8GHz/3.35GHz
- 2x SSD SATA 480GB
- 512GB DDR4 ECC 2400MHz
- 1Gbit/s unmetered and guaranteed (can go up to 10Gbit)
- USA (Hillsboro - West Coast - Oregon)
Prash is getting started (Simon as well soon) and is ramping up quickly - his first task is to get our Lotus support tested against the Filecoin testnet.
We are working on improving various user experience issues, including making bacalhau get nicer to use.
We now have the Grafana dashboard showing rate of change of number of jobs run on the network, so we can see activity on the network in real-time:
- Improved docs, UX, onboarding
- Early prototype of the verification simulator
- Dev tooling to integrate EVM smart contracts