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Hardware Requirements

warning

Cloud-based environments are not officially supported.

Requirements​

All requirements are the same between validators (consensus participants) and full nodes aside from bandwidth:

  • CPU: 16 core CPU with 4.5 GHz+ base clock speed, e.g. AMD Ryzen 9950x, AMD Ryzen 7950x, AMD EPYC 4584PX, etc.
  • Memory: 32 GB+ RAM
  • Storage:
    • 2TB dedicated disk for TrieDB (Execution)
    • 2TB disk for MonadBFT / OS
    • PCIe Gen4x4 NVME SSD or better for both
  • Bandwidth:
    • 300 Mbit/s (Validators)
    • 100 Mbit/s (Full Nodes)

Why Bare Metal?​

Monad nodes must operate on bare metal servers rather than virtualized or cloud-based environments (e.g., AWS EC2, GCP, Azure) due to the system's strict performance and timing requirements.

A bare metal server gives the node direct, stable access to hardware, ensuring smooth operation and synchronization with the network:

  • Monad’s consensus protocol enforces tight time windows—blocks are proposed and voted on in sub-second intervals, and the network assumes nodes can validate and execute blocks within this budget. In such a situation, cloud-based environments may introduce latency and unpredictability, which can cause nodes to miss deadlines, fall behind in block processing, or become unstable during high-throughput periods.

  • Even when resources appear sufficient on paper, virtualization adds an additional layer of software between the node and physical hardware. This layer introduces context switching overhead and restricts direct I/O access to SSDs and network interfaces. These effects are negligible for average compute tasks but become significant when sustained high-throughput and low-latency operations are required, as in Monad’s consensus and execution loops.

In summary, a bare metal server provides predictability and determinism, which are crucial for maintaining synchronization and throughput across the network. Cloud-hosted VMs may work under light loads, but they cannot guarantee consistent real-time performance required by Monad consensus at scale.