RNP-005 Recap (BTN: October 27th, 2023)

Recapping RNP-005, its community vote, and next steps

Earlier this week a new Render Network Proposal (RNP) was submitted, for initial vote by the Render Network community at large. This RNP, numbered ‘RNP-005’, authored by Eli Mernit of Beam Cloud and Ryan Shea of The Render Network Foundation, proposes the integration of a new Compute Client on the Render Network.

While falling into a broader category of “Compute Client Providers”, Beam provides an expansion of services in AI / ML compute to the Render Network ecosystem. To read the entire proposal, please see RNP-005 in the Render Network Github. Without further ado, let’s dive further into the details behind RNP-005.

What is Beam and what will this do to the Network?

Beam is an on-demand GPU cloud service that seeks to provide GPUs for AI and ML projects. With this proposal Beam seeks to leverage the Render Network’s expansive GPU nodes to aid in providing power to their clientele, with a focus on catering to smaller, less user intensive scale projects in the AI/ML space. This is done by the Beam protocol auto-grouping and scaling clusters based on hardware specifications, so the user simply has to specify what hardware they need, and Beam creates clusters for them.

As the Beam team notes within their proposal, this gears them more towards quick creation and testing, which can be useful for such users who are perhaps looking to run a plethora of smaller-scale ML tests rather than a longer form testing environment.

What does this mean for Render Network users?

Similar to IO.net and future compute client additions, Beam primarily affects Node Operators, and it is an opt-in function on their part. What this means is that Node Operators have the option of volunteering their nodes to be a part of the Beam pool, which means that they will appear as part of the available GPU capacity for Beam jobs.

For Node Operators, this will involve installation of a Beam agent onto their nodes, which will handle registration, job assignment and orchestration. Payouts for work done as part of the Beam protocol will be made through the Render Network and in tokens, just like current work done on the Render Network for rendering jobs. Functionally this means that there is no change needed on the Node Operators part in terms of payment setup, it is simply an opt-in.

What comes next?

RNP-005 has passed the initial community vote on Snapshot, and can be viewed here. The final vote saw 1.4m RNDR cast to approve vs. 2.9k RNDR cast to deny, resulting in a pass onto the next phase.

RNP-005 will now move onto a further audit and review period by the Foundation team, as well as the community at large, before entering into a final vote in the near future, to determine if it will be added to the development roadmap. For more information around vote timing and participation, please follow Render Network socials for information.

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