NuNet Quarter Three 2023 Recap

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NuNet

7 min readOct 2, 2023

Greetings NuNetopians,
Quarter 3 has gone by quickly, and we at NuNet have been very busy. Significant strides have been made in the development and testing of the NuNet network, and new members have been welcomed into the NuNet core team. This quarter has seen the completion of the Cardano Catalyst Fund 10 voting, for which NuNet submitted seven proposals. NuNet attended the Rare Evo event, and will soon be attending the Cardano Summit. All this and more will be summarized in this article.

Key Achievements

NuNet has created great interest in the Cardano community with a promise of cheaper access to compute power (CPU and GPU) with two Catalyst proposals. This has resulted in a community of 2000+ members on the Discord. Members are active in the testing process, bug reporting and even contributing to the open source code of the platform. Community members consist of developers, other project owners and SPOs (Cardano stake-pool operators).

NuNet has successfully finished the development and implementation of:

Foundational algorithms
Compute resource estimation
Resource price estimation
ML job status reporting
Resuming incomplete ML jobs
NuNet onboarding GPU devices and allowing users to set amount of resource to be used
NuNet equipped with ability to access multi-vendor GPUs
NuNet containers supporting cross vendor GPU access
Framework to monitor resource usage of GPUs and make them directly available to the processes running inside the containers
Webapp API specification and implementation for machine learning dApp access to the workflows
Onboarding ML workloads on NuNet for alpha testing NVIDIA and AMD GPUs available on that specific provider device. ML workloads enabled are: PyTorch and TensorFlow
The Gpuinfo Go library for fetching cross vendor GPU information
The Gpudetect Go library for detecting cross vendor GPUs
Plutus contracts and adaptation of Tokenomics API for compensating GPU resource owners via NuNet platform (on testnet, to be deployed on the mainnet after the 3rd and final audit passthrough by the auditor: Obsidian)

We maintained transparency throughout by structuring our project on Gitlab, mapping out our epics, milestones, and assigning team members their respective roles. A thorough insight into our tasks and accomplishments can be accessed here.

Read the full report on the Project Catalyst site here.

We would like to thank the Cardano Community and our testers for their continued support in the closure of this project.

Project Catalyst F8 Milestone Closure

NuNet isn’t just a platform; it’s a symbol of revolutionary infrastructure within the Cardano ecosystem. By offering a platform for developers, we’re ushering in a new era where large cloud competitors aren’t the only solution for machine learning endeavors. Earlier this quarter NuNet successfully completed its Project Catalyst Fund8: Decentralized GPU ML use case.

F7 Update

In January 2022, the Cardano community greenlit NuNet’s initiative titled “NuNet: Decentralized SPO Computing”. This project aims to empower stake pool operators (SPOs) to operate their Cardano block-producing nodes using hardware from the NuNet network. The progression of this initiative has been paused, as NuNet’s primary developers have been gearing up for the mainnet launch. Nonetheless, after the mainnet introduction, NuNet is committed to wrapping up the SPO project.

We held a technical discussion with NuNet’s technical lead to shed some light on the obstacles that are preventing the closure of the SPO project which you can view here.

A summary of topics covered in this session include:

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.

Development Update

The NuNet development team have been working hard on our Public Alpha to bring it to mainnet as secure and robust as possible. Many NuNet components have been overhauled over the last few months and a great deal of internal testing has been done before releasing to our testing community, but it was worth the wait! Our testers have reported back that the jobs are now running more smoothly and quicker than before.

The new releases bring a variety of updates to the DMS (device management service) and SPD (service provider dashboard). Here is a summary of new updates, you can read the full blog here.

DMS Updates Summary

New Features:

GPU Support: Seamless detection of both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs on one machine, with additional enhancements for mining OS.
Swagger Docs: Easily access request/response structures and freshly generated docs, featuring direct Swag inclusion.
Wallet Transactions: Enhanced security with wallet address validation, simplified transaction hash retrieval, and precise job claims.
Logging: Advanced Logger class introduced and added telemetry events to the ELK stack.
Onboarding: Enhanced management and monitoring of onboarding status through new endpoints and CLI commands.
Oracle: Incorporated TLS for oracle RPC and introduced new oracle addresses.

Improvements:

Efficiency: Faster DHT fetching and better GPU logs.
Config: Commenting option in config files and transition of CLI for optimal performance.
Services: Distinct services based on image names.

Bug Fixes:

Streamlined native ping, enhanced DHT routines, comprehensive onboarding validations, resolved GPU concerns, updated protocols, and more.

House Cleaning:

Removal of old DHT methods, deprecated telemetry, and the RequestTracker table, among others.

SPD Updates Summary

New Additions:

Error Handling: Enhanced mechanism to display funds-related wallet errors.

Tweaks:

Peer List: Updated for a better user experience.
UI: Minor text adjustments and background removal for a sleeker interface.
Transaction Tracking: ‘depreq’ send-status now includes the transaction hash for precision.

For more frequent technical updates join our Discord and head to the Technical Updates announcements channel.

Community Testing Rewards Structure

NuNet has rewarded our Stage 1 & 2 testers during this quarter. We value and appreciate all testers that have helped build and test the NuNet platform. We are still working on closing out stages 3 and 4 so there is still some time for new testers to get involved. If you would like to know more about testing rewards please see our blog.

F10 Project Catalyst

The Catalyst Fund10 Results are out and unfortunately NuNet did not receive any funding for its proposals. We would like to thank all those who took the time to read our proposals, voted and participated in the fund. We will continue to build regardless of this outcome. As our proposals did receive many votes, we would like to thank the Cardano Community for their support, as always.

Team Updates and Open Positions

NuNet is happy to announce that we have expanded our team during Q3, welcoming 3 new members into our team. This brings the NuNet team to a total of 32 members and we look forward to continuing to grow the team.

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 careers page.

Events

Rare Evo

The NuNet team attended the Rare Bloom event this year. Our CEO Kabir Veitas gave a presentation on ‘Open Source Development plus Decentralization is the way forward’ and discusses the history of decentralized computing, watch the full presentation here.

We are also happy to announce that NFTs from last year’s event have been distributed. More info here.

Cardano Summit

NuNet is happy to announce that we will participate in the Cardano Summit this November in Dubai. Last year, the NuNet team built valuable connections with community members, testers and developers who have aided in the development of the NuNet platform. We look forward to this year’s event and meeting some more of our community.

Technical Discussions

During Q3 NuNet continued their live technical discussions on Discord. Topics covered include:

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: