Getting Started

This quickstart shows how to run a minimal local demo: one Orchestrator and one or two Physical Nodes (PNodes) on your machine, submit a tiny network, and see DCNR in action.

Prerequisites

  • Docker (recommended for the Orchestrator)
  • Go 1.22+ (to build the PNode from source)
  • curl or a minimal CLI to submit the demo network

1) Start the Orchestrator

The orchestrator manages the network topology and PNode registrations.

# Run via Docker (if available)
docker run -p 50052:50052 dcnr-orchestrator

The orchestrator should expose gRPC for PNodes and an API for network submission.

See also: Orchestrator · Protocol

2) Start a Physical Node (PNode)

The PNode provides the compute resources and hosts the Virtual Nodes (VNodes).

# Register with the local orchestrator
ORCHESTRATOR_ADDRESS=localhost:50052 PNODE_PORT=50051 ./pnode

Expected logs:

  • PNode server listening at :50051
  • Successfully registered with orchestrator

See also: Physical Node (PNode)

3) Submit a Simple Network

A network is a graph of VNodes.

Example network:

  • Input -> Linear -> ReLU -> Output

Submit via CLI or curl. Capture the network ID.

See also: API Examples

4) Observe Execution

  • The Orchestrator allocates VNodes to available PNodes.
  • PNodes instantiate VNodes and execute the requested operations (Forward or Train).
  • VNodes communicate with each other regardless of whether they are on the same PNode or different PNodes.

5) Observe Fault Tolerance

Try stopping one of your PNodes while a job is running. The Orchestrator will detect the missing heartbeats and re-allocate the VNodes to any remaining PNodes.

See also: Architecture Overview · Trust & Validation

6) Next Steps

Built in the open. Owned by the community.