This Week in Lotus - Week 42 - 2023

Network Version 21 - 🍉 Watermelon 🍉 - Update

The Calibration network successfully upgraded to NV21 🍉 on Thursday the 19th of October at epoch 1013134 and we are happy to report that everything is looking great!! The team will be testing and stressing the network in every way possible in the run-up to the Mainnet upgrade on the 28th of November and as always, we would love to hear feedback, questions and suggestions from our awesome Calibration Community!!

If you are thinking about firing up a Calibration node of your own to test drive all the goodies that landed with the 🍉 Watermelon upgrade, you can find links to the new NV21-compatible releases at v1.24.0-rc2 and v1.25.0-rc1. Remember to read through the release notes before installing or upgrading and join us in putting some of the very cool new features like 3.5-year sector durations and Synthetic PoRep through their paces!! 🤝

⚠️ The team has identified a minor issue with the new movable partitions feature where attempting to relocate a partition that contains expired sectors will result in a failed MovePartitions message. This is a non-critical bug which will be resolved in an upcoming release. You can still test this new feature right now by simply running a lotus-miner sectors compact-partitions before running the new lotus-miner actor move-partitions command. ⚠️

Super Speedy SupraSeal C2 Sealing Success!

❗ Please note that this is an experimental feature and is not currently recommended for a production environment ❗

The team have spent the last few days testing the new SupraSeal C2 and together with excellent initial stability we are seeing a huge reduction in C2 sealing times of up to 75% 👀👇!! We are also witnessing a marked reduction in GPU utilization and power consumption! ⚡

GPU                 |  Speedup  |  CUDA (sec)  |  SupraSeal (sec)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Quadro RTX 6000     |  4.86     |  1104        |  227
RTX 4090            |  3.67     |  525         |  143
A4000               |  2.03     |  1091        |  538

You can try out the SSC2 upgrades right now by downloading the freshly minted v1.25.0-rc1! We have also created a dedicated tutorial page for the SupraaSeal setup that you can access here. 📓

Please let us know what kind of speeds and benchmarks you manage to hit with SSC2 on your own setups and we will add them to the list!! 🙏

Update on FIP-0074: Removing Cron-based Automatic Deal Settlement

FIP-0074 will introduce manual settlement of paid storage deals where payment is settled on-chain. Whilst the group of SPs potentially affected by this FIP is still very small, it’s super important to highlight the potential impact on all SPs that currently accept paid deals or plan to in the future. 💰

The proposal features a new SettleDealPayments method and automatic deal settlement via the market actor’s cron handler will be phased out. This is a crucial change that will help ensure fast and predictable tipset validation time and mitigate potential risks of chain processing being overwhelmed by cron tasks as we saw earlier this year prior to the Network Version 19 upgrade. This will only affect new deals, your existing deals will continue to be settled automatically!

The proposal will result in an additional SP-triggered manual step as well as the extra cost associated with invoking the new SettleDealPayments method. The real cost is negligible while the base fee is low, and the cost impact will drop even further once the upcoming Direct Data Onboarding upgrade moves unpaid deals out of the built-in market actor entirely.

FIP-0074 will be moving into last call soon so please take a moment to review the proposal here. You can leave your questions and comments directly in the proposal thread on GitHub or join the conversation in the #fil-fips channel here.

Direct Data Onboarding & SuperSnaps: Adding Snarkpack for SnapsDeals

2 highly anticipated and requested FIPs have taken a big step forward this week!

💾 FIP0076 - Direct Data Onboarding: has now been officially merged and development efforts are progressing at impressive speed! The team are currently working on introducing market/miner built-in actor events with the aim to ease both ecosystem adoption and updates and you can read all about it here.

The addition of Snarkpack for SnapsDeals conversationis also now well underway in FIP Draft 838 and the ability to batch snap deal messages like ProveReplicaUpdates is getting closer!!

For both FIP0076 and FIP Draft 838, we sincerely welcome community feedback and peer reviews! Both proposals will potentially deliver significant enhancements to SPs so please take a moment to give them an important review and let us know what you think!! 🙏

That’s it for the week! Have a great weekend! ☀️