I’m announcing the official launch of SOLAR FARM, a Livepeer Orchestrator powered entirely with green power. While this is the official launch, SOLAR FARM has been up and running for just under 2 months (July 16, 2021) to confirm reliability and optimize for the best performance.
SOLAR FARM is located in Los Angeles on a fiber gigabit Internet connection near the Livepeer ingest server and is currently the top performer in Los Angeles. A back up server is on site and can be online in minutes. SOLAR FARM is not reliant on grid power and has both a battery backup that can run the server for days and under extreme conditions can be powered by our natural gas generator.
Current hardware and bandwidth can support over 100 concurrent streams and will be expanded as demand grows.
In addition to starting SOLAR FARM in July 2021, I have participated in Livepool for several months and am the #1 earner in the US. I have been involved in the live video streaming and transcoding/encoding space since the begining of Internet video. Yes I’m old enough to have streamed 160 x 120 video to 28.8 and 56k modem users I’ve worked with companies ranging from large entertaiment studios ABC and SONY PICTURES to tech corporations including MICROSOFT, AOL, Yahoo! and many smaller startups.
I began calling rewards in round 2292 and will continue daily calls to show my commitment to this project and reward early supporters of SOLAR FARM 100% of Rewards will be paid out to my delegators.
To stake with SOLAR FARM and receive the highest rewards on Livepeer while supporting renewable crypto click the link below.
First I was chosen by Titan Node to be the first recipient of Titan Node - Start Up Grant to bring awareness to SOLAR FARM and through a very generous stake help bring in more transcoding work.
Then as a complete surprise 0x525 | vires in numeris offered (and has already staked) an additional 5k LPT toward SOLAR FARM!
I’m feeling very grateful today and can’t thank them enough for having confidence in me to be a valuable member of the Livepeer community. From the bottom of my heart thank you both
A quick update on other Farm news, I made my 7th consecutive Reward call today and will continue with my pledge to call daily rewards.
Minutes of video transcoded the second week of September have exploded and I expect the trend will be even more dramatic next week with the increased stake.
One of the things that seems to always surprise people about Livepeer is how little energy is required to run an Orchestrator. I think they hear the term video mining and equate it with POW mining picturing rows of GPUs running full bore 24/7. The reality though is that the decoding and encoding chips used to transcode video are extremely efficient and only use a fraction of a GPU’s total compute power. It’s not uncommon for an Orchestrator to only use slightly over 100 watts during light loads and not a much more during medium to heavy loads.
Because of these efficiencies I am able to power my Orchestrator with a relatively small solar array. I installed the below pictured panels so that we could have backup power after a fire burned through large portion of our community a few years ago leaving us without power for several weeks.
The panels feed a cluster of LiFePO4 batteries storing the excess energy generated during the day to keep the server running 24/7. …And because the GPUs use such a small amount of power compared to POW mining they don’t require additional cooling adding to an already efficient system. Take that Elon
Work has continued to increase with approximately 10% more minutes of video transcoded per day compared to last week and we have made the last 16/16 Reward Calls with the reward cut still at 0%.
If you’d like to support a new and reliable Orchestrator with the best rewards on Livepeer head over to the SOLAR FARM profile on the Explorer and consider staking with us.
Good day at the Farm today! We hit over 50k minutes of transcoding today and beat our previous daily minutes transcoded best which was only yesterday with over 4700 minutes transcoded in the last 24 hours (up to 5k now as I’m posting this).
I had an opportunity to upgrade to the latest Livepeer release 0.5.21 this morning so we are ready for fast verification when it goes live on the network.
I’ve decided to add at least 2 3070 GPUs to the Orchestrator after we maxed out our sessions 3x in the last hour. I have the cards here ready to install but will wait to do it when traffic slows down.
That’s awesome! I’m just getting into this space now and look up to operations such as yours. I’ve been in crypto since the early days but this is my first step into leveraging my GPU for transcoding video.
Btw, i’m a videographer/editor. I moved away from LA when COVID hit but if you need someone who’s passionate about this space and works within the content creation industry, feel free to hit me up
Welcome to the Livepeer community! If you have any questions or need help with anything Livepeer related jump into the Livepeer Discord and ask away, we’re always happy to help people get going.
I am no longer calling daily rewards so I can’t in good faith ask delegators to stake with me under the current conditions. I will be updating my Reward and Fee cuts when gas prices allow to 50% and 100% respectively.
On a positive note work has been consistent with only a very slight drop since the end of the Titan-Node grant and support from vires-in-numeris. Thank you both for the help kick starting Solar Farm
In preparation for the migration to Arbitrum to make Solar Farm the most attractive Orchestrator to delegate your LPT, I have moved to a multi node setup and now have servers located on the East and West coasts of the US, the EU and Singapore.
This has resulted in Solar Farm having the best Global Performance score of any Orchestrator in the Livepeer network!
Rewards are now being called daily with a competitive Reward cut of 3.5% (lower than any other top 5 performing Orchestrator).
Fee cut is also competitively set at 60% which will result in a bigger fee share for delegators than staking with larger Orchestrators with the same or lower Fee as there are fewer delegators to split the earnings among.
Please feel free to contact me here or on the Livepeer Discord where I am very active as Papa_Bear#7167 with any questions.
In order to keep Solar Farm the most attractive Orchestrator to stake your LPT I am setting my Reward to 0% (That means 100% of inflationary tokens go to my delegators).
Solar Farm’s new multi node setup continues to perform even better than I hoped keeping us consistently at the top of the Performance Leaderboard.
It’s been a while since we’ve provided an update here, so here’s a little of what we’ve been up to and have planned for next year…
Year End Update: Solar Farm Transcoder Campaign
As we close out the year, I’d like to share some milestones we’ve achieved and outline our plans for the future—particularly around hardware scaling, tooling improvements, and ongoing contributions to the Livepeer network and its emerging AI capabilities.
Hardware & Infrastructure Updates
Current Fleet:14 GPUs
Transcoding: Our transcoding operations currently leverage a total of 11 GPUs worldwide.
AI Network Integration: We were one of the first orchestrators on the AI network joining while in it’s closed beta. We currently have 2 NVIDIA 4090 GPUs online, dedicated to AI compute.
Workflow Development: An NVIDIA 4080 GPU is now dedicated to developing ComfyUI workflows to support Cascade’s offerings.
Scaling for the Future: To meet the growing demands of the network and reinforce our position as a top provider for AI workflows, we are currently in discussion with a system integrator to purchase a new server with 4x NVIDIA 5090 GPUs to secure some of the first 5090’s to hit the market.
Contributions as amember of theLivepeer.Cloud SPE
This year, the SPE completed two successful projects, simplifying access to Livepeer’s infrastructure and bringing AI metrics to the network.
Highlights of Livepeer.Cloud SPE’s work:
Free-to-Use Gateway: Secured funding and provisioning of the free-to-use Livepeer.Cloud Gateway Node, ensuring open access through February 2025.
Open-Source Integration (Owncast): Successfully integrated Livepeer with the open-source streaming server Owncast, enabling easy deployment and decentralized live streaming.
Simplified Operations: Developed clear documentation to reduce friction for new Gateway Node operators, accelerating the learning curve and adoption.
Network Growth: Increased Gateway Nodes from 8 in February to over 35 today.
Transcoding & Fees: Processed over 853,000 minutes of transcoded video, paying out 0.72878 ETH (~$2,250) in fees to orchestrators.
AI Job Tester: Implemented a dedicated application to test and validate AI job performance on the network’s active orchestrators.
Data Integration: Extended the Leaderboard Data API to track both transcoding and AI job performance metrics, ensuring richer insights and transparency.
AI Performance Leaderboard: Deployed an updated leaderboard on the Livepeer Explorer, offering real-time benchmarks of AI job performance and orchestrator rankings.
AI Jobs Processed: Over 155,000 AI jobs completed, showcasing the network’s expanding role in enabling intelligent media services.
Earnings & Incentives: The surge in AI task execution facilitated 3.42 ETH (~$9,250) in fees paid to orchestrators
SOLAR FARM as a member of Video Miner Pool
AI Pool: We developed an internal working AI pool that will be released as an open-source project in January 2025 and deployed to Video Miner Pool and Grant Node Pool.
Additional Tools & Innovations
Performance Inspector & AI Generator: Created these tools to offer orchestrators and broadcasters deeper insights into performance metrics and to easily test the network’s AI capabilities.
Reporting & Analytics Tools: Implemented services to track ETH fees, LPT rewards, and other KPIs, empowering operators and participants with data-driven decision-making.
tools.livepeer.cloud: Centralized many of these functionalities, reinforcing our commitment to accessibility and user experience.
Looking Forward to Next Year
We have laid a strong foundation, both in terms of hardware and platform capabilities. In the coming year, our focus will be on:
Hardware Scaling: Adding new GPUs as soon as they are released to increase performance and capacity on the AI network ensuring Livepeer can meet growing computational demands.
Refined Analytics & Reporting: Building more robust monitoring tools to foster greater adoption and transparency, helping orchestrators and broadcasters understand and optimize their usage.
AI Expansion: Further developing AI-enabled workflows to drive more advanced, intelligent video applications on the Livepeer network.
Conclusion
This year has been a transformative period, both for SOLAR FARM and Livepeer. We’ve made Livepeer more accessible, scalable, and future-ready, enabling the next generation of decentralized streaming and AI-driven media applications.
Thank you to everyone who supported these initiatives. We’re excited for what’s to come and look forward to another year of innovation and growth.
I’ve worked with companies ranging from large entertaiment studios ABC and SONY PICTURES to tech corporations including MICROSOFT, AOL, Yahoo! and many smaller startups.
