Gonka — AI Inference Infrastructure
Active buildSpecified, deployed, and supported a 24-node GPU cluster (192× RTX 4080) serving open-weight LLMs on the Gonka decentralized AI inference network — plus an OpenAI-compatible API gateway built on top of it.
- GPU Infrastructure
- RTX 4080 Clusters
- Open-Weight LLMs
- Qwen
- vLLM
- Decentralized Inference
- Express
- TypeScript
- Zod
- SSE
- Docker
- Vitest
Outcome
24-node / 192-GPU inference cluster specified, deployed, and supported for 3 months on the Gonka decentralized AI network, serving Qwen 235B-class models — plus GonkaProvider, a public OpenAI-compatible API gateway with streaming validation and an upstream vLLM fix.
Context
Gonka is a decentralized network for AI inference: hosts run GPU servers serving open-weight models and earn network tokens for verified compute. During the network's early phase, a host engaged me to take their operation from zero to production: hardware selection, procurement guidance (servers sourced from China), deployment, and ongoing operations — delivered with a 3-month support guarantee. Client identity and commercial figures are confidential.
Scope Delivered
- Hardware specification: advised on server selection for a 24-node cluster, 8× RTX 4080 per node — 192 GPUs in total — balancing inference throughput, memory bandwidth for large models, power, and cost.
- Model serving: deployed open-weight LLM inference at scale, including Qwen 235B-class instruction models, during the network's early development phase.
- Operations: node setup, network onboarding, monitoring, and a 3-month support engagement covering incident response and tuning.
GonkaProvider — API gateway (own work, public)
On top of the infrastructure work, I built and open-sourced GonkaProvider: an OpenAI-compatible Express/TypeScript gateway that proxies chat completions to Gonka ML nodes via the signed gonka-openai client.
- Strict TypeScript + Zod validation across the boundary.
- SSE stream validation, reasoning and tool-call aggregation, multimodal normalization.
- ADRs, unit tests, and integration tests.
- Includes an upstream fix for a vLLM chunk-validation bug found while integrating.
Outcomes
- 192-GPU inference operation taken from hardware shopping list to revenue-earning production on a live decentralized network.
- 3-month guaranteed support delivered to completion.
- Public gateway codebase demonstrating AI-integration engineering: streaming, validation, and provider abstraction.