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solana/docs/src/running-validator/validator-reqs.md

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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.
  • 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 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.

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. If your machine is using a different CUDA version then you will need to rebuild from source.