🚧 Project Abundance 🚧

All the updates in recent weeks were about Proof-of-Space performance improvements, but what was really driving it is my exploration into how to efficiently implement it for GPU. Today I’m happy to announce that an initial version of that implementation is integrated into the farmer. I’ve tested it on both AMD and Nvidia GPUs, but in principle it should work on any Vulkan 1.2-capable GPU, which includes both discrete and integrated graphics from something like the last decade or so. It will also run on Apple Silicon Macs (actually tested in CI) and likely older Macs with Intel/AMD GPUs as well, though I didn’t bother verifying it myself. The fact that it runs doesn’t necessarily mean it is fast, though, so the bulk of this post will be about that.

It has been a couple of weeks since the last status update about performance improvements in Proof-of-Space and I am finally at a decent stopping point where all architectural changes are done and I can share them with you.

This is just a short note about something that was not possible to do as cleanly before. If you worked with GitHub Actions for a meaningful period of time, and especially for testing Rust code, you will know that Windows runners are really slow. They are easily the bottleneck in many workflows and until recently there was no good way around it without turning the whole workflow into a mess. Thankfully, GitHub Actions recently introduced support for Yaml anchors in workflow files, which allows to reuse parts of the workflow instead of copy-pasting them.