Ray on Golem mainnet guide

The most common way of starting your adventure with Ray on Golem is by trying it out on the Golem testnet. The testnet nodes are not very powerful and there are not many of them. At the same time, it provides a sufficient environment to see how everything works and to test your Ray applications.

As your application gets more complex and you need more power, you should move to the mainnet. There are more providers, and the machines they run on are more powerful. However, you have to pay to use them.

Check out the online providers if you are curious about what kind of machines are available on the mainnet.

Switching to the mainnet is as easy as changing the provider.parameters.payment_network property in your cluster yaml:

• payment_network: "holesky" stands for the testnet
• payment_network: "polygon" stands for the mainnet

That is the only change required to start your Ray on Golem cluster on the mainnet.

If you don't have any funds, ray up will fail and direct you to our onboarding portal which will guide you through obtaining them.

Please consider using budget control mechanisms to manage your spending.

Payments within the Golem Network take place on the Polygon blockchain and require some GLM tokens (to pay the providers) and POL (for payment transaction fees).

Feel free to learn more about mainnet payments and funding your Golem node.

Note that the funds you spend on your Ray on Golem cluster don't go to Golem Factory. The GLMs go directly to providers you rent the nodes from and the POLs go directly to Polygon blockchain validators who enable your payments.

In case you try to start a mainnet cluster without sufficient funds, ray up will fail and print a link to our onboarding portal.

ray up golem-cluster.yaml --yes

Cluster: golem-cluster

Ray On Golem
  Starting webserver with deadline up to `0:05:00`...
  Webserver is not yet running, waiting additional `2` seconds...
  Starting webserver done

  Running Ray on Golem on the mainnet requires GLM and POL tokens on the Polygon blockchain (see: https://docs.golem.network/docs/creators/ray/mainnet).
  Your wallet:
    
    Status for account: 0xae5d43485a341bc4f167f6a4fda0749f1d7f3e11
    
    ┌────────────────────┬────────────────┬────────────┬─────────────┬────────────┬────────────┬───────────┐
    │  platform          │  total amount  │  reserved  │  amount     │  incoming  │  outgoing  │  gas      │
    ├────────────────────┼────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────┼────────────┼────────────┼───────────┤
    │  driver: erc20     │  0 GLM         │  0 GLM     │  accepted   │  0 GLM     │  0 GLM     │  0 POL  │
    │  network: polygon  │                │            │  confirmed  │  0 GLM     │  0 GLM     │           │
    │  token: GLM        │                │            │  requested  │  0 GLM     │  0 GLM     │           │
    └────────────────────┴────────────────┴────────────┴─────────────┴────────────┴────────────┴───────────┘
  
  You can use the Golem Onboarding portal to top up: https://glm.golem.network/#/onboarding/budget?yagnaAddress=0xae5d43485a341bc4f167f6a4fda0749f1d7f3e11&network=polygon

You don't seem to have any GLM tokens on your Golem wallet.

Even if you do have the required funds, ray up will nevertheless print the onboarding link as a reminder, in case you'd like to top up your wallet.

The onboarding process is a convenient and effortless way of providing your Ray on Golem node with funds allowing it to run on the mainnet.

Initially, your Golem node generates and later manages its own Ethereum wallet, which is used to perform transactions. This wallet starts empty and Ray on Golem transparently obtains funds needed to operate on testnet.

To fill it with mainnet funds, the onboarding portal guides you through the creation of a separate, web-browser wallet, getting GLM and POL tokens there, and finally transferring them to the wallet used by Ray on Golem.

Of course, if you already have your own Ethereum wallet with GLM and POL tokens, you don't have to get new ones. Just connect your own wallet and transfer enough of them to Ray on Golem.

When handling real funds, it is generally a good idea to back up your Ray on Golem wallet. Note that Ray on Golem doesn't directly support password-locked wallets yet. Therefore, we recommend operating with low amounts of funds for the time being.

To proceed with the above instructions you will need to access the Golem node service (yagna). Normally, it should be running in the background after the first successful ray up. Other than that, you can always start it manually with yagna service run command.

Note that, if you lock your wallet with a password, you will need yagna to unlock it every time it starts. Also, remember that ray up starts the yagna service if it doesn't find it running.

Ray on Golem provides a couple of mechanisms to give you control over your spending:

• hard limit of spending on each Ray on Golem cluster (from ray up to ray down)
• limit of provider prices accepted by Ray on Golem
• choosing the cheapest providers based on your expected cluster life duration and average load
• network stats tool helping you to set price limits reasonably

Golem Network is peer-to-peer, which means that providers' proposals are not always available at first. They get broadcasted only from time to time.

This means that when you first start Ray on Golem, it might take a while to find a provider matching all your requirements.

Ray on Golem is using the Golem node (yagna) for interacting with the network. The ray up starts it if it is not running, but ray down doesn't stop it. This way the subsequent ray up executions benefit from a faster node discovery.

Of course, you might want to disconnect from the Golem network for a while - read the starting over article to learn how to do that.

Ray on Golem utilizes the reputation endpoint to score providers based on their uptime and success rate, combined with pricing heuristics. This automatic process ensures you're always paired with top-performing and cost-efficient nodes. The ray-on-golem reputation list command lets you view the current database state, showing provider scores and prices.

For direct control, the feature allows blacklisting of nodes that underperform or fail to start images. Use the ray-on-golem reputation block command to prevent specific nodes from being considered in future selections. Conversely, the unblock subcommand removes nodes from your blacklist, making them eligible again.