BurntPix Benchmark - EVM killer 2.0

Burnt Pix are generative images, computed by the EVM. They are called EVM killers because they are extremely computationally intensive, taking up billions to even trillions of gas to compute a single image (at a high refinement count).

This repository does not contain the source code for the Burnt Pix generators, rather it contains an Ethereum genesis file pre-seeded with the generator binary to allow using it as a benchmark and stress test for EVM client implementations.

How To Run

Running the generator requires:

• Initializing a new Ethereum network with the provided genesis.json
• Doing a CALL operation to run the generator:
  • Call contract 0x49206861766520746f6f206d7563682074696d65
  • Call method function run(uint32, uint256) returns (string)
    • Calling the method id 0xa4de9ab4
    • Send a uint32 image seed (e.g. 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000)
    • Send a uint256 iteration count (e.g. 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000400)

Different seeds will produce different images based on a variety of mathematical operations, so optimising across multiple ones might be better than focusing too much on any one in particular. Also, it's always fun to see a different output and not just raw numbers.

The iteration count influences how much computation is spent on producing the output image. It can be used both as a fun aspect as well as a way to control the runtime of the execution. From a visual perspective, 500K seems like a nice value. It also takes a few seconds to run on Geth.

An example call via Geth's evm utility would be:

$ evm run --prestate ./genesis.json --receiver 0x49206861766520746F6F206D7563682074696D65  --input 0xa4de9ab40000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000007A120

The output is a Ethereum ABI encoded string (in hex form in the case of Geth's evm utility). Feel free to parse the string out to get the generated SVG image!

Since I know the output is a bytes array (word 1 == offset; word 2 == length; rest == data) and I know the format is an ASCII string with a closing </svg> tag, we can YOLO the decoding by ignoring the prefix and trimming the 0 byte suffix.

$ [evm run command] | tail -c +131 | sed 's/[0]*$//' | xxd -r -p > output.svg

You can finally add --bench to Geth's evm command to have a report on the self-measured performance numbers. As a full example to render the above red dragon image (in a fair but not extreme resolution):

% evm run --prestate ./genesis.json --receiver 0x49206861766520746F6F206D7563682074696D65  --input 0xa4de9ab4000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000F1FD58E000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000007A120 --bench | tail -c +131 | sed 's/[0]*$//' | xxd -r -p > output.svg

EVM gas used:    5642735088
execution time:  10.824049458s
allocations:     482930
allocated bytes: 96876728

% open output.svg

Pretty Combos

Here are some pretty parameter combinations to keep you entertained whiles optimising :)

BurntPix	Seed	Iterations	Gas
	0x0	7A120	1194877856
	0xD0FC9AE	7A120	3720507082
	0xF1FD58E	7A120	5642735088
	0x2456635E	7A120	2361285957
	0x25FAAB93	7A120	2195254953
	0x287FBB44	7A120	2152976762
	0x3F502349	7A120	2529514632
	0x58F5D174	7A120	1724272483
	0xBAB62971	7A120	2499357241
	0xCD3BAB83	7A120	2391316900
	0xD72C0032	7A120	3264176440
	0xFCC0C87B	7A120	2590196975