Wish List: GPU Mining + Transcoding Tools

The Problem Current scaled GPU miners who are hashing cryptocurrencies are interested in Livepeer's value proposition of being able to concurrently transcode video without disrupting their mining, but don't have an easy way to try this out or operate it without doing significant infrastructure and protocol related actions.

Potential Solutions Create software that automates the process of setting up a Livepeer Orchestrator, adding your GPUs to the cluster as transcoders, and operates Livepeer in conjuction with currently mining.

Whether this software runs alongside other mining software, or whether it needs to be built into mining software, is TBD as both paths are viable.

Challenges

While it is somewhat straightforward to concurrently transcode video and hash cryptocurrency, the requirement of running a Livepeer orchestrator is an entirely new operational challenge. It requires attaining LPT, running a new orchestrator process, solving bandwidth issues, etc. So this is not as simple as just downloading a binary and running it instead of your current mining pool software.
There are so many different mining setups across the various hardware/software combinations. Focus on ones that can deliver the types of infrastructure operators that can provide reliable work on the network - scaled deployments with significant bandwidth, and the devops skills to run an orchestrator node reliably.

Summary This wish list item is intentionally broad. There are many different approaches that can provide a big impact to the Livepeer ecosystem here. If you're familiar with the mining world, and have a solution in mind to make it easy for GPUs to join the network and operate effectively, then we'd love to provide grants to help enable open source tools come to reality in this area.

livepeer / grants

Wish List: GPU Mining + Transcoding Tools #4