Crispr
Crispr is an application that merges Helix plot file chunks into Helices and Helix arrays. Crispr is a part of the Helix software suite that uses an innovative technique of condensing hashes before storing them to a hard drive. This allows for the storage of twice as many hashes as stored in conventional plot files. Hashes will be decompressed while mining using the computational power of a GPU.
Prior to running Crispr, users will have to create Helix chunks using the Compressor plotter.
Crispr is available for download at the dedicated Helix page of the PoC-Consortium GitHub repository. The page currently offers 2 compiled versions of the application:
- crispr-0.6.0-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip for Windows systems, and
- crispr-0.6.0-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz for Linux systems.
The installation of Crispr is straightforward: unpack the archive and place the executable in the desired folder.
Note for Windows users: some antivirus software may report a false positive finding for the Crispr and automatically disable its' operation. In such cases, it is necessary to exclude the folder where Compressor is placed from virus scanning. To see the results of virus scan for Crispr, refer to the VirusTotal website.
The Helix suite has hardware requirements that are considerably greater than those for pre-Helix PoC mining. This is the result of high RAM and GPU performance requirements, that are needed for the creation and condensed storing of Shabal hashes.
Exemplary Helix hardware setup:
- Storage: 8 x 10 TB HDDs
- RAM: 32 GiB
- GPU: Nvidia 1050Ti
- CPU: any 64-bit CPU, not older than 5 years
This setup will result in 160 TB/144 TiB Helix effective plot size with scan time of ~60 seconds.
To improve performance, additional staging drive, which has to be of size equal to the size of other HDDs in the setup, can be used to store the chunks produced by the Compressor, which becomes the source drives for Crispr processing.
Crispr is a CLI application. To run it, users have to run the command line interface as administrators. On Windows systems, the command prompt is run by clicking the Windows button in the task bar, typing "cmd" and clicking the "Command Prompt". To run the command prompt as an administrator, Windows users should right click the Command Prompt icon and select "Run as administrator".
To run Crispr in the CLI, users should navigate to the location where the executable file is stored and run the application by typing crispr.
Once Crispr is running, a list of flags and options will be displayed to the user, which are used to configure the creation of Helix plot files and arrays from previously plotted chunks.
None of the flags are mandatory for merging plot file chunks with Crispr.
Available flags are:
-d, --ddio: disables direct I/O if used. Direct IO usage bypasses the OS caching layer. Note that using direct I/O affects the RAM usage, in a way that enabling direct I/O (which is the default setting) will require more available RAM.
-b, --buffers: if set, it will allow for the override of default buffers to be used. The default value is 2.
-q, --quiet: runs Crispr in non-verbose mode (without showing non-critical messages in the CLI).
-h, --help: displays help information.
-V, --version: displays version information.
-s, --source
-t, --target : defines the target path(s) where output Helix plot files or Helix arrays will be stored after merging has been completed. It is possible to provide multiple paths, in case of which the Helix array will be stored on multiple drives, which results in optimized scanning time. The target path is a mandatory setting.
-m, --mem : maximum amount of RAM memory to be used for merging. If the unit is not provided, the number will be interpreted as bytes. If the user provides the suffix, it will be interpreted as the unit: e.g. "-- mem 4GiB". If the parameter is omitted, the Cripsr will use all available RAM.
Supported suffixes are: B, KiB, MiB, GiB, TiB