Giga-Garden

   Over two years ago our developer, Chris, created a program that could draw simple flowers using a mathematical equation. In May 2021, the flowers generator was spruced up with extra variables and randomness to create infinite possibilities to be more fitting for the NFT world. These designs still needed a way to guarantee every flower is unique, so the development of the 4k Deep Dream AI began. You would never know what the next flower would look like or be able to recreate it.

              Creating and uploading twelve thousand 4k resolution images turned out to be bit of a challenge! For the program to draw a new flower it takes about 10 seconds. That image is then uploaded to a specialized machine learning computer the AI required to create such detailed 4k images. With one Amazon server(1 Nvidia Tesla V100 GPU) it took about 90 seconds to Deep Dream an image. It takes a little less than two minutes to create a flower, not bad right? Well for 12,000 images this means it would take 16.67 days to render the entire collection with the AI grinding day and night.

              We had a launch date set and didn’t have two weeks to spend waiting for the flowers. Our only option was to split the computational work between six graphics cards, on three servers. With this much needed improvement, it only took 4 days for the flowers to finally finish rendering. All 250GB worth of PNGs were downloaded and the AI was shut down.

              Uploading a quarter terabyte of data to IPFS seemed like a challenge, until it seemed impossible after realizing the upload was going to take days. Luckily Nate has gigabit internet(30x faster than Chris’s internet). We realized the only way we can upload the flowers in time for launch was to load the flowers onto a flashdrive and mail it across the country to Nate. Everything worked out in time and the drop went smoothly. With a whole community of friendly trippy people, Giga Garden was born! Together we can push the boundaries of NFTs even further!