---
title: Validator Requirements
---

## Hardware

- CPU Recommendations
  - We recommend a CPU with the highest number of cores as possible. AMD Threadripper or Intel Server \(Xeon\) CPUs are fine.
  - We recommend AMD Threadripper as you get a larger number of cores for parallelization compared to Intel.
  - Threadripper also has a cost-per-core advantage and a greater number of PCIe lanes compared to the equivalent Intel part. PoH \(Proof of History\) is based on sha256 and Threadripper also supports sha256 hardware instructions.
- SSD size and I/O style \(SATA vs NVMe/M.2\) for a validator
  - Minimum example - Samsung 860 Evo 2TB
  - Mid-range example - Samsung 860 Evo 4TB
  - High-end example - Samsung 860 Evo 4TB
- GPUs
  - While a CPU-only node may be able to keep up with the initial idling network, once transaction throughput increases, GPUs will be necessary
  - What kind of GPU?
    - We recommend Nvidia 2080Ti or 1080Ti series consumer GPU or Tesla series server GPUs.
    - We do not currently support OpenCL and therefore do not support AMD GPUs. We have a bounty out for someone to port us to OpenCL. Interested? [Check out our GitHub.](https://github.com/solana-labs/solana)
- Power Consumption
  - Approximate power consumption for a validator node running an AMD Threadripper 2950W and 2x 2080Ti GPUs is 800-1000W.

### Preconfigured Setups

Here are our recommendations for low, medium, and high end machine specifications:

|                     | Low end                                               | Medium end             | High end               | Notes                                                                                  |
| :------------------ | :---------------------------------------------------- | :--------------------- | :--------------------- | :------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| CPU                 | AMD Threadripper 1900x                                | AMD Threadripper 2920x | AMD Threadripper 2950x | Consider a 10Gb-capable motherboard with as many PCIe lanes and m.2 slots as possible. |
| RAM                 | 16GB                                                  | 32GB                   | 64GB                   |                                                                                        |
| OS Drive            | Samsung 860 Evo 2TB                                   | Samsung 860 Evo 4TB    | Samsung 860 Evo 4TB    | Or equivalent SSD                                                                      |
| Accounts Drive\(s\) | None                                                  | Samsung 970 Pro 1TB    | 2x Samsung 970 Pro 1TB |                                                                                        |
| GPU                 | 4x Nvidia 1070 or 2x Nvidia 1080 Ti or 2x Nvidia 2070 | 2x Nvidia 2080 Ti      | 4x Nvidia 2080 Ti      | Any number of cuda-capable GPUs are supported on Linux platforms.                      |

## Software

- We build and run on Ubuntu 18.04. Some users have had trouble when running on Ubuntu 16.04
- See [Installing Solana](../cli/install-solana-cli-tools.md) for the current Solana software release.

Be sure to ensure that the machine used is not behind a residential NAT to avoid
NAT traversal issues. A cloud-hosted machine works best. **Ensure that IP ports 8000 through 10000 are not blocked for Internet inbound and outbound traffic.**
For more information on port forwarding with regards to residential networks,
see [this document](http://www.mcs.sdsmt.edu/lpyeatt/courses/314/PortForwardingSetup.pdf).

Prebuilt binaries are available for Linux x86_64 \(Ubuntu 18.04 recommended\).
MacOS or WSL users may build from source.

## GPU Requirements

CUDA is required to make use of the GPU on your system. The provided Solana
release binaries are built on Ubuntu 18.04 with [CUDA Toolkit 10.1 update 1](https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolkit-archive). If your machine is using
a different CUDA version then you will need to rebuild from source.