Bladebit 2 User Guide (WIP)

Bladebit 2 User Guide

CLI usage

Bladebit CLI's syntax has changed to a command based format to accomodate for the different plotting methods now included, and to allow for some helper tools to be included as well. If you are familiar with CLI tools such as git, docker, lldb, etc. then this should feel right at home.

The new format is as follows: bladebit [GLOBAL_OPTIONS] <command> [COMMAND_OPTIONS]

Where GLOBAL_OPTIONS are options that may apply to multiple commands, or to the whole application state. COMMAND_OPTIONS are options which are specific to the specified command and they must be to typed immediately following the command.

To learn more about a specific command, type bladebit help <command> or bladebit -h <command>.

Plotting to disk

Use the diskplot command to use the new disk plotting feature. Type bladebit help diskplot or bladebit diskplot -h to learn more about the diskplot command and all its options.

Example usage

To begin using the diskplot command, you will need your farmer public key, and one of your pool public key (for OG plots) or a pool contract address (for pool plots).

You can obtain those values by doing the following with the official chia CLI:

# To get farmer public key and pool public key
chia keys show

# To get your pool contract address
chia plotnft show

You will also need at least a 500GB drive of temporary storage for plotting.

As an example, you can start plotting with the minimum configuration required like so:

./bladebit -f <farmer_pub_key> -c <pool_contract_address> diskplot -t1 <temporary_dir> <output_dir>

Where you would replace <farmer_pub_key> and <pool_contract_address> with your farmer public key and your pool contract address, respectively, <temporary_dir> and <output_dir> with paths to a temporary work directory and a final output directory, respectively.

With this command, bladebit will immediately begin creating a plot. However, the default config is far from ideal as it will default to using the maximum available CPU threads for all phases.

Benchmarking

Bladebit now contains integrated benchmarking tools for disk and memory using the same commands that are used in plotting, but can be done quickly to profile a system. iotest is for testing the storage

For Linux ./bladebit -t 1 iotest -s 32G /mnt/ssd

For Windows .\bladebit.exe -t 1 iotest -s 32G D:\temp\

memtest is for testing memory bandwidth ./bladebit -t <thread count> memtest -s 32G

Starting out

generally best practice to start out with -t (threads) at 2 less than the total thread count on your system, to reserve some threads for background and io. The default buckets is currently set to 256

./bladebit -t <thread count> -f <farmer key> -c <contract address> diskplot -t1 /mnt/ssd /mnt/hdd

you can add DRAM cache to reduce SSD writes with --cache <amount> <units> an example below

./bladebit -t <thread count> -f <farmer key> -c <contract address> diskplot --cache 32G -t1 /mnt/ssd /mnt/hdd

there are currently options to tune the threads in each phase

Optimal settings

The optimal system configuration will be an enterprise SSD and 128GB of DRAM. With >99GB of cache in alternate mode, all of temp2 will be cached in ram. 64 buckets will generally be the fastest since more data per bucket is getting transferred from the SSD to host memory. 64 buckets require around 11GB of system memory plus whatever is left for cache

./bladebit -f <farmer key> -c <contract address> -t <thread count> diskplot -t1 /mnt/ssd/ -b 64 --cache 99G -a /mnt/hdd

thread count should be set to whatever the maximum threads of the system minus 1 (total threads - 1) to reserve one thread for io thread. Additional tuning can be done on threads per phase, but if storage is not a bottleneck this will generally be the fastest setting.

Running from chia

if you installed the latest Chia client, bladebit2 is included. The command line is changed from the binary to match the existing chiapos and madmax support as much as possible.

chia plotters bladebit2 -f <farmer key> -c <contract address> -r <thread count> -u 64 --cache 100G --alternate -t /mnt/ssd -d /mnt/hdd

Disk reads and writes

currently the alpha with default 256 buckets is

• 1.414 TB read per k=32 plot
• 1.313 TB written per plot
• WAF = 1.076 (measured on P5510 3.84TB)

example bandwidth targets (will change in beta). burst bandwidth (from iotest) needs to currently be about 3-4x this to meet the plotting time requirement

10 minute plot needs average bandwidth of 1313.5 GB / 600 seconds = 2.189 GB/s average write bandwidth. This can be achieved on a 32 core machine

30 minute plot time = 1313.5 GB / 1800 seconds = 730 MB/s average write bandwidth