Bladebit Chia Plotter

A high-performance k32-only, Chia (XCH) plotter.

Bladebit supports 3 plotting modes:

• Fully In-RAM (no drives required), CPU-based mode.
• GPU (CUDA-based) mode. Both fully in-RAM or disk-hybrid mode.
• Disk-based mode

Usage

Run bladebit --help to see general help. For command-specific help, use bladebit help <command_name>.

Requirements

CUDA

An NVIDIA GPU is required for this mode. This mode is exposed via the cudaplot command in a separate executable "bladebit_cuda". This mode has mainly been tested on consumer cards from the 10xx series and up.

Mode	OS	DRAM	VRAM	CUDA capability
In-RAM	Linux, Windows	256G	8G	5.2 and up
Disk-hybrid 128G	Linux, Windows	128G	8G	5.2 and up
Disk-hybrid 16G (WIP)	Linux	16G	8G	5.2 and up

NOTE: 16G mode currently a work in progress and at this stage it only works in Linux and direct I/O is unavailable in this mode.

CPU RAM-Only

Available on Linux, Windows and macOS. Requires at least 416G of system DRAM.

Disk

Available on Linux, Windows and macOS.

A minimum of 4 GiB of RAM is required, with lower bucket counts requiring up to 12 GiB of RAM. Roughly 480 GiB of disk space is required in the default mode, or around 390 GiB of disk space with --alternate mode enabled.

The exact amounts of RAM and disk space required may vary slightly depending on the system's page size and the target disk file system block size (block-alignment is required for direct I/O).

SSDs are highly recommended for disk-based plotting.

Compressed Plots

Compressed plots are supported in CUDA mode and in RAM-only mode. CPU Disk-based mode does NOT currently support compressed plots.

Compressed plots are currently supported for compression levels from C1 to C7. Note that bladebit compression levels are not compatible with other plotter compression levels. These compression levels are based on the number of bits dropped from an entry excluding the minimum bits required to fully drop a table. At k=32 a the first table is fully excluded from the plot at 16 bits dropped.

NOTE: Although higher compression levels are available, support for farming them has not been currently implemented and are therefore disabled. They will be implemented in the future.

Compression levels are currently roughly equivalent to the following plot sizes.

Compression Level	Plot Size
C1	87.5 GiB
C2	86.0 GiB
C3	84.4 GiB
C4	82.8 GiB
C5	81.2 GiB
C6	79.6 GiB
C7	78.0 GiB

These might be optimized in the future with further compression optimizations.

Requirements

GPU (CUDA) Plotter Requirements

Supported system configurations for alpha:

OS	Windows and Linux
Memory	256GB of system DRAM
GPUs	NVIDIA GPUs with CUDA capability 5.2 and up with at least 8GB of vRAM

See https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus for compatible GPUs.

In-RAM

416 GiB of RAM are required to run it, and a few more megabytes for stack space and small allocations.

64-bit is supported only, for obvious reasons.

Disk-based

A minimum of 4 GiB of RAM is required, with lower bucket counts requiring up to 12 GiB of RAM.

Around 480 GiB of total temporary space is required when plotting to disk in the default mode, or around 390 GiB with --alternate mode enabled.

The exact amounts of RAM and disk space required may vary slightly depending on the system's page size and the target disk file system block size (block-alignment is required for direct I/O).

SSDs are highly recommended for disk-based plotting.

Prerequisites

Linux, Windows and macOS (both Intel and ARM) are supported.

Linux

Install the following packages:

# CentOS or RHEL-based
sudo yum group install -y "Development Tools"
sudo yum install -y cmake gmp-devel numactl-devel

# Ubuntu or Debian-based
sudo apt install -y build-essential cmake libgmp-dev libnuma-dev

Windows

Must have at least Visual Studio 2019 or its build tools installed.

macOS

Must have Xcode or Xcode build tools installed. brew install cmake

Optionally install gmp: brew install gmp

Building

# Clone the repo & its submodules
git clone https://github.com/Chia-Network/bladebit.git && cd bladebit

# Create a build directory for cmake and cd into it
mkdir -p build && cd build

# Generate config files & build
cmake ..
cmake --build . --target bladebit --config Release

The resulting binary will be found under the build/ directory. On Windows it will be under build/Release/.

For bladebit_cuda, the CUDA toolkit must be installed. The target name is bladebit_cuda.

For simplicity the build.sh or build-cuda.sh scripts can be used to build. On Windows this requires gitbash or similar bash-based shell to run.

Usage

Run bladebit (or bladebit_cuda) with the -h for complete usage and command line options:

# Linux & macOS
build/bladebit -h

# Windows
build/Release/bladebit.exe -h

The bladebit CLI uses the format bladebit <GLOBAL_OPTIONS> <command> <COMMAND_OPTIONS>.

Use the aforementioned -h parameter to get the full list of commands and GLOBAL_OPTIONS. The command-specific COMMAND_OPTIONS can be obtained by using the help sub command with the desired command as the parameter:

bladebit help cudaplot
bladebit help ramplot
bladebit help diskplot

CUDA

Basic cudaplot usage:

# OG plots
./bladebit_cuda -f <farmer_public_key> -p <pool_public_key> cudaplot <output_directory>

# Portable plots
./bladebit_cuda -f <farmer_public_key> -c <pool_contract_address> cudaplot <output_directory>

# Compressed plots
./bladebit_cuda -z <copression_level> -f <farmer_public_key> -c <pool_contract_address> cudaplot <output_directory>

# 128G disk-hybrid mode
./bladebit_cuda -z <copression_level> -f <farmer_public_key> -c <pool_contract_address> cudaplot --disk-128 -t1 <temp_dir> <output_directory>

In-RAM

Basic ramplot usage:

# OG plots
./bladebit -f <farmer_public_key> -p <pool_public_key> ramplot <output_directory>

# Portable plots
./bladebit -f <farmer_public_key> -c <pool_contract_address> ramplot <output_directory>

# Compressed plots
./bladebit -z <copression_level> -f <farmer_public_key> -c <pool_contract_address> ramplot <output_directory>

Disk-Based

Basic diskplot usage:

# OG plots
./bladebit -f <farmer_public_key> -p <pool_public_key> diskplot -t1 <temp_directory> <output_directory>

# Portable plots
./bladebit -f <farmer_public_key> -c <pool_contract_address> diskplot -t1 <temp_directory> <output_directory>

# Differing temp directories:
./bladebit -f ... -c ... diskplot -t1 /path/to/temp_1 -t2 /path/to/temp2 /my/output/dir

# With a 100 GiB temp2 cache and alternating mode
./bladebit -f ... -c ... diskplot -a --cache 100G -t1 /path/to/temp_1 -t2 /path/to/temp2 /my/output/dir

# With fine-grained thread control depending on the workload
./bladebit -f ... -c ... diskplot --f1-threads 12 --fp-threads 32 -t1 /path/to/temp_1  /my/output/dir

License

Licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. See LICENSE.

Copyright 2023 Harold Brenes, Chia Network Inc