Bacalhau - The Filecoin Distributed Computation Framework

Background

To read more about this project, please read our Read Me

Latest

Our most recent demo (2022-02-11):

bacalhau-demo-run-it-yourself.mp4

running locally

requirements

• x86_64 linux host
• go >= 1.16
• ignite
• ipfs cli
  • NOTE: You must use ipfs v0.11.0 https://ipfs.io/ipns/dist.ipfs.io/go-ipfs/v0.11.0/go-ipfs_v0.11.0_linux-amd64.tar.gz

pull ignite base image

This prepares the system for running ignite VMs:

sudo ignite run binocarlos/bacalhau-ignite-image:v1 \
  --name footwarmer \
  --cpus 1 \
  --memory 1GB \
  --size 10GB \
  --ssh
sudo ignite rm -f footwarmer

NOTE: for results to be published, each bacalhau node must have a public IP address

You can still run the demo locally, but the results won't be served over the public ipfs network.

start compute nodes

Have a few terminal windows.

This starts the first compute node listening on port 8080 so we can connect to a known port.

go run . serve --port 8081 --dev --start-ipfs-dev-only

It will also print out the command to run in other terminal windows to connect to this first node (start at least one more so now we have a cluster)

For example:

go run . serve --peer /ip4/127.0.0.1/tcp/8080/p2p/<peerid> --jsonrpc-port <randomport> --start-ipfs-dev-only

submit a job with the CLI

First we add a data file to run the job against - the serve command will have printed out the command to do this - it's just an ipfs add command that targets a specific bacalhau node so we can show self selection of jobs working:

cid=$(IPFS_PATH=data/ipfs/<bacalhau_node_id> ipfs add -q /etc/passwd)

Now we submit a job to the network:

go run . submit --cids=$cid --commands="grep admin /ipfs/$cid"

To view the current job status:

go run . list
go run . list --output json
go run . list --wide

running the demo on seperate servers

When running a real demo (i.e. on different machines with public ips) - here are the things to consider:

• add the same file to each node using ipfs add - so the CID of the job has a file on each node
  • don't use /etc/passwd as shown above - it needs to be exactly the same on each node
• when starting the servers, make sure to use public IP and not 127.0.0.1 in the multi-address used to point at the first node
• start the ipfs daemon on each node before starting bacalhau
• don't start the bacalhau daemon with --dev or --start-ipfs-dev-only

running the client standalone

If you are running the bacalhau client on a machine that is not running the server - then you must start the ipfs daemon yourself, manually (so we can do ipfs get for the results)

firecracker os image

We use Docker to build the image that firecracker VMs are started with.

The Dockerfile lives in docker/ignite-image/Dockerfile

To rebuild this image:

bash scripts/publish-ignite-image.sh

NOTE: once you have pushed a new version of the image you must:

sudo ignite image ls
sudo ignite image rm <id_of_old_image>