Running a Node: Mining Requirements

Irys's mining combines Useful Proof of Work, staking a mining address, and pledging individual partitions.

System Requirements

The minimum system requirements will be established based on the real-world performance observed during testnet.

Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) Requirement

One fast CPU core (ideally with SHA-256 extensions) is required to compute the VDF. It’s possible to subscribe to a remote VDF server if you have trouble keeping up with the network.

Packing Requirement

Before mining a partition, it must be packed. Irys’s Matrix packing is time-based and can be parallelized. This means the task can be divided into smaller sub-tasks that run simultaneously across multiple processing units, significantly speeding up the overall process. With a modern gaming GPU, a 16TB partition can be packed in a few hours.

Storage Requirements

Each partition is approximately 16TB in size and is intended to be mined on an HDD. Irys’s VDF limits the amount of data that can be mined per partition to 200MB/s. This is well within the transfer rate of enterprise/data center HDD drives.