The Boundless Proving Stack
Overview
At the core of the Boundless proving stack is Bento, which fundamentally builds upon the RISC Zero zkVM. The Boundless team shipped Bento after 2+ years of operating a highly parallelized and highly performant remote proving cluster, known as Bonsai. Bento encapsulates this practical experience and learnings into a stack built for the Boundless market. Bento scales from single GPU machines to large clusters which makes it ideal for provers in the Boundless protocol.
What is Bento?
Bento is a semi multi-tenant proving cluster for the RISC Zero zkVM. Concretely, Bento is a Docker compose stack which contains all the services needed to run a Bento cluster. It is highly configurable, and features:
- multi GPU support.
- multi machine support.
- support for proofs of any size.
- safe cache/storage for all proof data.
- a robust retry system.
- an API for proof management.
The Prover Quick Start has information about getting started with Bento, a recommended initial configuration and how to run basic sample proof workloads.
What is the Broker?
The Broker is responsible for market interactions (see steps 2b. and 4a. in Figure 1) including evaluating requests to assign a price, bidding on requests to lock them, issuing proving requests to the Bento proving cluster, and submitting proof fulfillments on-chain.
Broker configuration is primarily managed through the broker.toml file in the Boundless directory.
Figure 1: Proof Lifecycle of a Boundless Proof.
To get started with the Broker, please see the Broker page.
How are Bento and the Broker related?
Bento is responsible for:
- the API for managing proof requests.
- queuing and scheduling proof requests.
- executing guest programs.
- running proving using the RISC Zero zkVM.
- aggregating proofs into the right format for the Boundless Market.
Bento is not responsible for interaction with the Boundless market.
The recommended service for market interaction for provers is the Broker service. The Broker is responsible for both interacting with the Boundless Market i.e., bidding on and fulfilling proof requests and sending job requests to the Bento proving cluster.
