Brass Golem Beta 0.20.0 - gWASM and RASPA have arrived!

Hi, Golem community! With beautiful summer all around - at least for those of us on the Northern Hemisphere - we’re not sure if we can get your moods even higher but at least we’ll have a stab at it.

Here we are with our newest baby - the shiny new major release - Brass Golem Beta 0.20.0 which comes with a whole lot of goodies for you to play around with. The two most important ones are gWASM that wementioned before anddescribed in detail on our blog as well as RASPA2 a.k.a. gLambda support (also mentioned in our previousDev Update). The small caveat here is that, in this release, we’re making them available to testnet users only, for now. That means that even though you won’t be able to earn GNT for being a provider of gWASM and RASPA2/gLambda yet, you’re most welcome to start experimenting with the new execution environments - especially with gWASM, that we’re planning to make available on mainnet soon.

One more time for those in the back - this is it! gWASM and RASPA a.k.a. gLambda are now integrated into the Golem software!

Those of you interested in diving into gWASM right away, please have a look at our pretty extensive primer on how to run our first gWASM test case - gflite - and how to write your own gWASM app:

https://docs.golem.network/#/Products/Brass-Beta/gWASM

https://docs.golem.network/#/Products/Brass-Beta/gWASM?id=how-to-run-g-flite

Happy testing and coding!

Other than that, what you’ll probably notice right away is the much revamped Electron front-end - it features the new task list for requestors, with nicer-looking and much more detailed list of jobs assigned to providers and their respective statuses, improved status reporting providing informative hints about possible problems when launching and running Golem app as well as a whole slew of smaller updates like new icons, fixes and performance improvements.

New Status Display New Task List

Another major change is the complete overhaul of our file transfer daemon (hyperg) with our own, tailored solution in order to make it faster and more robust, thus removing a major obstacle that often prevented the Golem nodes from correctly finalizing the task’s flow. We believe it will be a major factor in improving the ratio of successes to all assigned tasks for all Golem providers.

A similar rationale is what has driven another feature introduced in the 0.20 - the persistent message queue which should improve communication between Golem nodes in scenarios where the connection between them is unstable and generally simplify communication flow between Golem nodes.

Apart from those major changes, our team has spent countless hours identifying, tracing and fixing many, many issues that had been identified in our previous releases and we’re pretty confident that the overall experience for our mainnet users should be much smoother than it had been so far.

For those of you interested in even more details, please consult the full changelog .

As always, we wholeheartedly encourage you to download the update and share any and all feedback - pertaining to both Golem itself and to our new gWASM environment - with us on chat , reddit and over email .

Here’s what to do if you want to upgrade:

Upgrading to Brass Golem Beta 0.20.0

Windows

Download and execute the installer from our release server. .

If you’re upgrading from versions prior to 0.19.x, be aware that Brass Golem Beta 0.19+ uses Docker for Windows. Docker for Windows comes with a new type of virtualization support: Hyper-V (Windows Server Virtualization) in place of the old Docker Toolbox. This virtualization change should provide a more stable environment for Golem nodes, but it does not come without difficulties.

Please be aware that if you are using any other virtualization software (for eg. Docker Toolbox, VMware), do not to install Hyper-V as this could potentially impact performance.

Also if you are a Windows 10 Home user you will not be able to install Hyper-V as it's not supported. Fortunately, we have kept Docker Toolbox support in this case. The only downside is that you will have to install Docker Toolbox manually from now on ( available here ), as it's no longer part of the install package. You’ll find more detailed Golem+Docker Toolbox installation instructions in our docs .

If you encounter any problems with Hyper-V you can still uninstall it, and try to run Golem with Docker Toolbox.

If any errors occur during any process, please let us know in the testers channel at chat.golem.network or write an email to [email protected] (make sure to include “Error” in the subject field so we can catch it quickly).

Please have a look at our Windows 10 installation tutorial on YouTube: https://youtu.be/TAozKguVoCc

Download the Linux installation script . In terminal, run:

chmod +x install.sh && ./install.sh

To upgrade Golem, type commands below to update Golem:

brew update

brew upgrade golem

brew cask upgrade golem

brew unlink golem

brew unlink hyperg

brew link golem

brew link hyperg

With those simple steps in place, you should be running the latest release of Golem for macOS.

Please have a look at our Mac OS installation tutorial on YouTube: https://youtu.be/TAozKguVoCc

Important! Before you run Golem make sure to be running Docker for Mac:

Cmd + space bar, type Docker and hit enter.

Confirm that Docker is running properly. If you encounter any issues with Docker for Mac please follow instructions on Docker for Mac github .