GPU Plotter

Overview

Autonomys utilizes your drive storage, specifically SSD or NVMe drives, to store plots. After the plotting process is finished, these plots are then farmed using your CPU. Farming is not particularly demanding on the CPU, enabling most modern processors to manage a substantial farm size. However, the plot creation process is highly resource intensive, which makes CPU plotting the main bottleneck.

Utilizing GPU plotting allows you to harness the power of compatible GPUs for plot generation and replotting, either in conjunction with or as a substitute for CPU processing. While many modern CPUs can complete the plotting of a sector in less than two minutes, a single high performance GPU can accomplish the same task in under five seconds, greatly improving efficiency and speed.

Although GPU plotting is not mandatory, it provides enhanced energy efficiency and speed compared to relying solely on a CPU.

Plot Format Compatibility

GPU plotting employs the new v1 plot format, which is applicable to any plots created with versions released on or after July 5th. In contrast, older software versions generated plots in the v0 format, which is only compatible with CPU plotting.

Supported Platforms and Graphics Card Compatibility

Platform	🐧 Linux	🪟 Windows	Nvidia	AMD	Intel
Advanced CLI	✅	✅	✅	🔜	🔜
Space Acres	✅	✅	✅	🔜	🔜

Supported Video Cards

Nvidia

Supported:

Architecture	Models
Hopper	H Series (H100, H200, H300)
Ada Lovelace	RTX 40 Series
Ampere	RTX 30 Series A Series (A100, A40, A30, A10, A6000, A5000, A4000)
Turing	RTX 20 Series Quadro RTX Series (RTX 8000, RTX 6000)
Volta	PRO Series (Tesla V100, Quadro GV100, Titan V)

Nvidia drivers version 550 or later are required. Installing the CUDA Toolkit is not required.

AMD

Supported:

Series	Models
PRO	W7800, W6800, V620
RX 7000 Series	7800 XT, 7700 XT, 7600 (but not 7600 XT)
RX 6000 Series	6950 XT, 6900 XT, 6800 XT, 6800

Potential Support:

Series	Models
RX 6700 Series	6750 XT, 6700 XT, 6700
RX 6000 Series	6650 XT, 6600 XT, 6600

Unsupported:

Series	Models
RX 5000 series	RX 5500, RX 5600

For more details, please consult the AMD ROCm Requirements for compatibility.

Intel

Intel Arc GPUs are expected to be supported in the future, but specific compatibility details have not been announced yet.

Common Plotting Parameters

Below are some essential parameters for configuring the GPU plotter:

• Set the number of sectors that the CPU plotter will encode simultaneously (the default setting is to use all supported GPUs when a compatible GPU is detected):

  --cpu-sector-encoding-concurrency <sectors>
  
  # Example:
  --cpu-sector-encoding-concurrency 2

• Specify particular GPUs for plotting rather than using all available GPUs (the default configuration employs all compatible GPUs):

  --cuda-gpus <gpu_ids>
  
  # Example:
  --cuda-gpus 0,1,3

Farming Cluster

When utilizing Farming Cluster, particularly with multiple or fast GPUs, you might encounter limitations due to your network's bandwidth. High performance GPUs can easily surpass the capacity of a 1G connection. While this won't cause the process to fail, it may result in your GPU idling as it waits for data to transfer. To optimize performance in such scenarios, consider upgrading to networking solutions of 2.5G, 10G, or higher.

Known Issues

• Occasionally, plotting may stop unexpectedly, requiring a restart of the farmer. We are aware of this issue and a fix is in progress.