Chia 2.0 released

Chia 2.0 was released on the 24th of August with support for compressed plots. Unfortunately you will need 416GB of free memory to compute them on CPU or you'll need a Nvidia GPU with CUDA support. Most desktop CPU's only support 128GB of memory so that means a server grade machine or a GPU. Hopefully a later release of the Bladebit plotter will support disk-based plots with compression.

After upgrading my full node to 2.0 all my harvesters were unable to communicate so I had to upgrade  them to 2.0 as well.

To get support for compressed plots you need to tell the harvester(s) the parallel_cpu count and the number of threads they can use. Unfortunately there is no configuration option to do this via the command line so you'll need to manually edit config.yaml if you don't have access to the GUI. Apart from the additional CPU usage expect an additional 500MB of memory use on each harvester.

One of the new features in the new GUI is latency stats for each harvester. My Pi's are currently getting an average of 183ms and 193ms. My secondary storage server (Intel core i3) is doing 116ms and the full node is taking 4.9 seconds. Clearly harvesters are more efficient than the full-node checking files across a network.

I am generating uncompressed plots to fill my primary storage server still. I'm up to 1808 plots taking approx 179TiB. Once Bladebit gets updated I will look are doing compressed plots on the Pis. I expect to use C1 (the lowest level of compression) as the Pi's don't have much CPU power. The secondary storage server has a bit more grunt so I expect to use a higher level of compression on it and the primary storage server has even more CPU power.

 

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