Estimate Hardware requirements, CPU, RAM and NVMe disks

[a-saksena]

Known questions:

• Main disk requirements, RAID/non-RAID options, maybe ZFS or btrfs?
  • How much disk space gets us how many years storage?
• What is the hash rate, can we use GPU or NPU resources, and what accelerators are available?
• What is the networking required, and what are the options?
• How much RAM do we require, what are the primary drivers of RAM usage?
• How much parallelism do we require, how many cores?
• Can we offload some functions to separate machines, possibly ephemeral?
• Can we use "typical" cost reduction approaches?
  • Can we reduce cost with several small/cheap machines?
  • Can we lower cost with networked storage for the large-volume historical data?
  • Can we use separate "worker" processes (K8S containers) to handle large/long processes like reconnect or state snapshots?
  • Should we be using ZFS, btrfs, LVM, etc...?
  • Do we need RAID (5/6) or is multiple-machine redundancy enough/better?
• What uptime requirements do we have?
• What is the impact of 1/3/6/12 simultaneous block node failures?
• What level of "spare" capacity do we need to avoid failure amplification?
• What is the disk read/write rate required for "recent" blocks, live state, state snapshots, "old" blocks, etc...?
• What data volume is required for "fast" data versus "slow" data?
• Do we need/want any level of CXL 2.0 support?