Chia Farming on a croit Platform

How to Generate Plots for XCH CHIA Coin

You may have already heard about it, but currently the new cryptocurrency Chia is coming strong. We have taken this as an opportunity to briefly look at it and show an example of how easy it is to create a full-fledged Chia farming cluster from a Ceph cluster, as well as any number of other servers, using the chroit platform.

In our example we use single NVMe available in the Ceph cluster which we provide with a min size 1 max size 1 pool for the temporary data when creating new plots. We take this because on the one hand it leads to a significantly higher performance, on the other hand we can tolerate the loss of temporary data.

The finished plots can then be stored as erasure code, e.g. 8+2, securely and economically in the long term on the same storage. This can of course also be detached from the plotter farm.

Let's Get Started

We assume that a small Ceph cluster including CephFS has already been set up with croit. The instructions for this can be found on our website at https://croit.io/software/docs.

Step 1: Create a CephFS NVMe Temporary Data Pool

As described, we create a new pool cephfs_data_nvme with min 1 max 1. Navigate to pools and click on create.

Step 2: Creating the CephFS directory

Navigate to the CephFS Explorer, create a directory there named chia-temp and assign it to the newly created pool cephfs_data_nvme.

Step 3: Creating the hook script

To install the service automatically, we can easily create a hook script in the Maintenance -> Hook Scripts menu.

You find it on Github at https://github.com/croit/scrip...

Step 4: Execution of the installation script

In order to execute the installation on the already existing nodes, you should now execute the script manually. For this purpose it is sufficient to press the Execute button.

Step 5: Creating workers

Depending on how powerful the hardware really is, it is recommended to run one or more parallel plots. To make this easy and convenient, we have installed a SystemD service called chia-plot@.service with our installation script. Now create another hookscript as shown to make use of it.

After you have completed these simple steps, your Croit cluster will now begin to create plots within the CephFS file system. Now all you have to do is use the plots and hope to generate an XCH coin with them.

We wish you good luck.

We are happy to provide help with the setup as usual. We also appreciate feedback and suggestions for improvement.