Validator Requirements

Minimum RENEC requirements

There is no strict minimum amount of RENEC required to run a validator on Renec.

However in order to participate in consensus, a vote account is required which has a rent-exempt reserve of 0.02685864 RENEC. Voting also requires sending a vote transaction for each block the validator agrees with, which can cost up to 1.1 RENEC per day.

Hardware Recommendations for Mainnet

• CPU
  • 12 cores / 24 threads, or more
  • 2.8GHz, or faster
  • AVX2 instruction support (to use official release binaries, self-compile otherwise)
  • Support for AVX512f and/or SHA-NI instructions is helpful
  • The AMD Zen3 series is popular with the validator community
• RAM
  • 128GB, or more
  • Motherboard with 256GB capacity suggested
• Disk
  • PCIe Gen3 x4 NVME SSD, or better
  • Accounts: 500GB, or larger. High TBW (Total Bytes Written)
  • Ledger: 1TB or larger. High TBW suggested
  • OS: (Optional) 500GB, or larger. SATA OK
  • The OS may be installed on the ledger disk, though testing has shown better performance with the ledger on its own disk
  • Accounts and ledger can be stored on the same disk, however due to high IOPS, this is not recommended
  • The Samsung 970 and 980 Pro series SSDs are popular with the validator community
• GPUs
  • Not strictly necessary at this time
  • Motherboard and power supply speced to add one or more high-end GPUs in the future suggested

Hardware Recommendations for Testnet

• CPU
  • 12 cores / 24 threads, or more
  • 2.8GHz, or faster
  • AVX2 instruction support (to use official release binaries, self-compile otherwise)
  • Support for AVX512f and/or SHA-NI instructions is helpful
  • The AMD Zen3 series is popular with the validator community
• RAM
  • 128GB, or more
  • Motherboard with 256GB capacity suggested
• Disk
  • PCIe Gen3 x4 NVME SSD, or better
  • Accounts: 500GB, or larger. High TBW (Total Bytes Written)
  • Ledger: 1TB or larger. High TBW suggested
  • OS: (Optional) 500GB, or larger. SATA OK
  • The OS may be installed on the ledger disk, though testing has shown better performance with the ledger on its own disk
  • Accounts and ledger can be stored on the same disk, however due to high IOPS, this is not recommended
  • The Samsung 970 and 980 Pro series SSDs are popular with the validator community
• GPUs
  • Not strictly necessary at this time
  • Motherboard and power supply speced to add one or more high-end GPUs in the future suggested

Software

• We build and run on Ubuntu 22.04.
• See Installing Renec for the current Renec software release.

Prebuilt binaries are available for Linux x86_64 on CPUs supporting AVX2 (Ubuntu 20.04 recommended). MacOS or WSL users may build from source.

Networking

Internet service should be at least 300Mbit/s symmetric, commercial. 1GBit/s preferred

Port Forwarding

The following ports need to be open to the internet for both inbound and outbound

It is not recommended to run a validator behind a NAT. Operators who choose to do so should be comfortable configuring their networking equipment and debugging any traversal issues on their own.

Required

• 8000-10000 TCP/UDP - P2P protocols (gossip, turbine, repair, etc). This can be limited to any free 13 port range with --dynamic-port-range

Optional

For security purposes, it is not suggested that the following ports be open to the internet on staked, mainnet-beta validators.

• 8899 TCP - JSONRPC over HTTP. Change with `--rpc-port RPC_PORT``
• 8900 TCP - JSONRPC over Websockets. Derived. Uses RPC_PORT + 1

GPU Requirements

CUDA is required to make use of the GPU on your system. The provided Renec release binaries are built on Ubuntu 20.04 with CUDA Toolkit 10.1 update 1. If your machine is using a different CUDA version then you will need to rebuild from source.