fishnet: distributed Stockfish analysis for lichess.org

Installation

Request your personal fishnet key: https://lichess.org/get-fishnet

Install and run the fishnet client.

Download standalone binary

Select the binary for your platform from the latest release and run it.

# After download:
chmod +x fishnet-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
./fishnet-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu --auto-update

Useful commands

./fishnet-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu configure              # Rerun config dialog
./fishnet-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu systemd --auto-update  # Print a .service file
./fishnet-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu --help                 # List commands and options

Other installation methods: From source, AUR, Docker, Kubernetes

Pick an update strategy.

Automatic updates

Run with --auto-update as recommended above (will currently still require manual restarts on Windows due to #151).

Subscribe to release announcements

With a GitHub account, you can watch this repository (can be set to release announcements only). See the top right corner on this page.

Video introduction

Watch @arex explain fishnet.

FAQ

Which engine does fishnet use?

fishnet uses Stockfish (hence the name) and Fairy-Stockfish for chess variants.

What are the requirements?

Available for	64-bit Intel and AMD	ARMv8 / Silicon
Linux	`x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu`	build from source
Windows	`x86_64-pc-windows-gnu.exe`
macOS	`x86_64-apple-darwin`	`aarch64-apple-darwin`
FreeBSD	build from source

Needs an operating system from around 2019 or later
Will max out the configured number of CPU cores
Uses about 64 MiB RAM per CPU core
A small amount of disk space
Low-bandwidth network communication with Lichess servers (only outgoing HTTP requests, so probably no firewall configuration required)

Is my CPU fast enough?

Almost all processors will be able to meet the requirement of ~2 meganodes in 6 seconds. Clients on the faster end will automatically be assigned analysis jobs that have humans waiting for the result (the user queue, as opposed to the system queue for slower clients).

Why does my client remain idle?

Your client may remain idle if fishnet estimates that another client would be able to complete the next batch more quickly, or if the client has been configured to join the queue only if a backlog is building up. By standing by, you're still contributing to the potential maximum throughput of the fishnet network.

What happens if I stop my client?

Feel free to turn your client on and off at any time. By default, the client will try to finish any batches it has already started. On immediate shutdown, the client tries to inform Lichess that batches should be reassigned. If even that fails, Lichess will reassign the batches after a timeout.

Will fishnet use my GPU?

No, Stockfish is a classical alpha-beta engine. The neural network evaluation of Stockfish NNUE works efficiently on CPUs.

Is fishnet secure?

To the best of our knowledge. All engine input is carefully validated.

Note that you implicitly trust the authors and the GitHub infrastructure when running with --auto-update. You can mitigate this by running fishnet as an unprivileged user.

cargo-crev is used to review the trustworthiness of dependencies.

Is there a leaderboard of contributors?

No, sorry, not publicly. It would incentivize gaming the metrics.

Can I autoscale fishnet in the cloud?

There is currently no ready-made solution, but an API for monitoring the job queue status is provided.

Protocol

See protocol.md for details. Also supports SSLKEYLOGFILE for inspection at runtime.

License

fishnet is licensed under the GPLv3+. See LICENSE.txt or ./fishnet-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu license for the full license text.

withprimer/fishnet