When is distributed proving coming? about winterfell

[irakliyk]

No - all current release of Winterfell don't allow using airthmetization-friendly hash functions during proof generation - this makes recursive proofs impractical. But the code currently in the main branch allows users to use any hash function. So, with the next release of Winterfell (hopefully in about a week), it would be possible to use it for recursive proofs.

[allezlom13]

@irakliyk Are you aware of a STARK implementation (VM or EDSL or ...) based on Winterfell that actually supports recursive proof verification today?

[irakliyk]

With recursive proofs being quite efficient nowadays, distributing proof generation across multiple machines can be done better with recursion. Specifically, instead of trying to generate one big proof spread over multiple machines, it would probably be much more efficient to generate smaller proofs on each machine, and then aggregate them using recursion.

So, distributing generation of one large proof across multiple machines is not actively being worked on at the moment.

[matthiasgoergens]

Thanks for explaining!

Is the current release of Winterfell now more recursion friendly?

[irakliyk]

Yes - recursion is fully supported now. In fact, this is already used in Miden VM.

[matthiasgoergens]

Awesome, thanks!