6Block: 30 Miners in 3 Continents with 30 PiB Storage Power, Ranking #1 in Filecoin Space Race 1
The first phase of the three-week Filecoin Space Race came to an end this Monday on September 14, 2020, EDT. In this competition, a total of 360 miners around the world participated in the competition, contributing a total of 230 PiB of computing power, exceeding Filecoin’s official expectations of 200 PiB.
6Block has 5 miner accounts registered in the Filecoin Space Race 1, with 30 miners in 3 continents, contributing a total of 30.78 PiB of computing power, winning a total reward of nearly 300,000 FIL, ranking #1 in total storage power among all the miners globally.
Please note that the above screenshots only show a reward for 6Block miner accounts from the Global pool. The total reward will be the sum of rewards from both the Global pool and the Asia pool.
Among the 5 miner accounts, the main miner account registered under the name“6Block” achieved 20.53 PiB of computing power, and the expected reward is 196,454.46 FIL, ranking №2 among all registered entities (data from filfox.info, actual rewards may be adjusted).
The two accounts registered as “Zillion-6Block”, running 6Block’s optimized software and maintained remotely by the 6Block team, produced a total of 10.25 PiB of computing power and its expected reward is 96,815.89FIL.
We also successfully experimented with the use of AWS to remotely deploy miners right before the closing window for miner registration. The cloud nodes deployed by 6Block in Africa and South America have successfully produced high storage and retrieval deal success rate and reached the requirement for rewards.
In this competition, 6Block has deployed and maintained more than 30 nodes simultaneously, covering setting up local miners, remote operation and maintenance of optimized mining software services, and setting up cloud nodes. 6Block’s overall order success rate of all nodes far exceeds the official competition standard.
6Block’s amazing performance in the Filecoin Space Race shows its powerful development and operation and maintenance capabilities.
Our Secret Power: Unique Architecture Design and Great Maintenance
Different from most mining pools, 6Block designed a small cluster architecture and separated the calculation and storage in each cluster. This architecture has the following advantages:
- When the lotus-miner fails in one cluster, it will not cause a loss in all our clusters;
- Distributed release: when there is a version update, we can deploy a small number of clusters first, verify the effect, and then deploy it in full scale;
- The storage can be expanded infinitely without any expansion bottleneck.
This Space Race is also a great test for our team’s operation and maintenance capabilities. Our hardware supply, fast miner deployment, and node operations all hold a high quality during the Race. All of our miners have qualified the reward, which is a great testimony of our capability.
Our clusters also followed the official version iteration to fix bugs and optimize performance in time. After the machine went online, except for the official Drand test period, our computing power was maintained steadily.
Our nodes also provide stable order services. The main miner account “6Block” received a total of 7,750 orders during the competition, with the storage success rate at 98%, and the retrieval success rate at 99%.
Community Contribution: the greater the ability, the greater the responsibility.
“The greater the ability, the greater the responsibility.”
While working hard during the Race, 6Block is also actively contributing to the Filecoin miners and developer communities.
During the competition,6Block has constantly updated its free community version of mining software on Github: https://github.com/shannon-6block/lotus-miner/releases, which has helped more than 20 miners mine successfully.
6Block also set up seed nodes in China to help miners synchronize the network faster.
We also helped the Filecoin official team fix several bugs, such as:
- Fixed the pointer error in reading the file during the retrieve process;
- In version 0.6.0 of the first hard fork, the synchronization problem in pubsub was discovered and reported in time. This problem will cause the block and message synchronization to fail. Then the official repaired it in time.
What’s next?
The intense Filecoin Space Race 1 has come to an end, and then there will be Space Race 2 and the mainnet. 6Block will continue to optimize the Filecoin mining algorithm and adhere to the principle of being open and transparent.
In addition to regular optimization and iteration, we are also preparing to open the source code of our community version of mining software after the official code is stable. At that time, users will be able to compile the community version of the mining software by themselves, and no longer need to worry about whether there is a backdoor in it.
The published source code will be maintained on Github. We will be responsible for regularly merge official updates. Community members and other miners are also welcome to use and maintain this source code together.
Giving back to the community is our responsibility as a member of the decentralized community. We hope that through the open-source of our community version, we can help small and medium miners tide over the difficulties together, and even give big miners inspiration for optimization. The prosperity and development of the Filecoin community is our common goal.
Happy mining!
You can follow the 6Block Twitter Account here. And also don’t forget to check Filfox.info, the best Filecoin chain explorer. You can also follow Filfxo.info’s twitter account here.
