Fund 7 Milestone Update — NuNet: Decentralized SPO Computing
Greetings NuNetopians,
In January of 2022, the Cardano community voted to approve NuNet’s proposal NuNet: Decentralized SPO Computing. This use case will allow stake pool operators (SPOs) to run their Cardano block-producing nodes on hardware provided on the NuNet network. Completion of this project has been on hold while NuNet’s core developers have been working to prepare NuNet for mainnet launch with the Decentralized GPU ML Cloud use case. However, NuNet will fulfill our responsibilities and complete the SPO use case after the mainnet launch. We recently held a technical discussion with Dagim, NuNet’s tech lead, to explain what is still blocking the SPO use case and how we will proceed with completing its milestones. This article will serve as a summary of the topics covered in this discussion.
Secure Sandbox/Virtual Machine
This use case requires a secure sandbox where the Cardano nodes can run. For that, we chose Firecracker virtual machine because it is more isolated than containers and more lightweight compared to other VMs. The idea was to enable one SPO to remotely deploy their node on a different machine. The first step was to create Firecracker images, then create an integration between the DMS (device management service) and Firecracker, to enable NuNet to launch Firecracker virtual machines. These have been implemented.
Secure Shell Access To Sandbox/VM
The next important step was to allow SSH (Secure Shell) access from the SPO to the virtual machine created on the compute provider’s device. For that, we had to pull through the peer-to-peer (p2p) network that was already created for the DMS and metadata to communicate. Implementation had been on the NuNet-Adapter which employed a different p2p network than the one we’re currently using. We switched over to Libp2p for better networking and in order to depreciate the nunet-adapter because it was too large.
Persistent Blockchain Data
When a Cardano node is deployed on a machine, it must download the entire blockchain data onto the machine it is running on, and it must keep synchronizing a copy of the blockchain while it is running. The problem we have to solve is that if there is an interruption on the machine it was deployed on, we need to be able to switch the process to a different machine and be able to preserve the data and avoid downloading again.
What Is Remaining To Complete
There are two main tasks remaining in order to complete this use case. We need to reimplement networking for remote shell access with the new networking library, as well as research and implement a securely shared storage in a p2p network.
Fund 10 Proposals
We recently announced that NuNet has submitted 6 proposals to Cardano’s Catalyst Fund 10, as well as collaborating with ArgusNFT on their proposal. Below is a list of all seven with links to the full proposals. Brief summaries of the proposals can be found in this article.
NuNet: Decentralized GPU Clusters — Research & PoC
NuNet: Decentralized GPU Splitting On Software Level
NuNet: Running OSS ChatGPT Alternatives On Decentralized Network
NuNet: Bioinformatics Simulations With Decentralized Computing
NuNet: DIDs For Components In NuNet Ecosystem
NuNet: Enabling Elasticsearch Clusters On Decentralized Hardware
ML-Powered NFT Recommendation API, Trained on the NuNet Network
NuNet Is Hiring!
NuNet currently has a number of open positions for various roles within the team. If you have the skills and desire to join us in our journey, you can find more information and contact us through our career page.
About NuNet
NuNet lets anyone share and monetize their compute resources, turning cloud computing power from a centralized service into an open protocol powered by blockchain. Find out more via:
