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Validator system requirements

Overview​

This page describes the minimum system requirements for validators on the Silvermint network. Silvermint is designed to support a variety of operating environments called "shards." Each of these will have its own hardware requirements, which should be tuned to support the applications that will run on the shard. As Silvermint development continues, hardware requirements will be updated periodically.

Because Silvermint nodes can be ejected and/or slashed, node operators must provision enough hardware and bandwidth to support the shard on which they run. Testnet operators should stay up-to-date with the latest hardware requirements by checking this page regularly and subscribing to our Discord.

The Silvermint node software is currently in pre-beta development. If you find bugs, please submit an issue on our Gitlab.

OS and Software​

Silvermint is developed and tested on Debian 11's stable release, known as bullseye. The software is distributed as a deb package available on our public repositories. Information about how to install silvermint software is located here.

Silvermint node software may run on Linux distributions that use dpkg, such as Ubuntu. However, Silvermint team does not test the software on those distributions at this time.

Hardware Requirements​

Our current TestNet Shard is known as "Ember." The Ember testnet is a small, privately hosted network intended to support a low throughput of a few hundred transactions per second. Our public tesnets will run at significantly highers TPS. Those networks may have different hardware requirements.

The Ember testnet current runs on Google cloud n1-highmem-16 VMs with the following specifications:

  • CPU - 16 core
  • RAM - 104 GB RAM
  • Storage - 100GB OS drive, 375 GB SSD

Networking​

Silvermint nodes accept connections from the Internet and must have enough bandwidth to support distributing and receiving blocks. It is expected that for the mainnet, nodes will need to provision 1 Gigabit/second of bandwidth. The Ember testnet currently requires less than 20 kB/s of bandwidth.