Architecture overview

Meris has three moving parts: the app server, the workers on contributor machines, and Postgres. There is no blockchain in the request path and no token.

 AI labs                         app.meris.network                         contributors
 ──────────                      ─────────────────                         ────────────
                     ┌───────────────────────────────────────┐
 lab code   ──HTTPS──▶  /v1 compute   ──▶ scheduler ──▶ registry ◀──WebSocket── worker ──▶ GPU
                     │      │                                 │            (outbound only)
 browser  ───HTTPS──▶  dashboard + /api                       │
                     │      │                                 │
                     │      ▼                                 │
                     │  Postgres: users, workers, jobs,       │
                     │  credits, payouts, hourly rollups      │
                     └───────────────────────────────────────┘

App server

One Node.js process serves everything at app.meris.network:

• /v1: the compute API labs use to rent GPUs.
• /api: the dashboard's JSON API (accounts, pairing, settings, analytics) and the worker pairing endpoint.
• /api/worker/ws: the WebSocket every worker keeps open.
• /install.sh, /install.ps1, /downloads/meris-worker.mjs: the worker and its installers.
• Everything else: the dashboard, a React single-page app.

Workers

A worker is a Node.js program on a contributor's machine. It opens one outbound WebSocket to the server; it never listens on a port, so it works behind home routers and NAT without configuration. Over that connection it reports its GPU and its state every five seconds. See Worker protocol.

Registry and scheduler

The server keeps every connected worker in memory: its VRAM, allocation, current jobs and whether it is paused or busy. When a lab submits a job, the scheduler matches it against this registry with no database round trip.

Postgres

The database is the source of truth for money and history:

Table	Holds
users, sessions	Accounts (linked to a Privy user), allocation settings, totals earned and spent
workers, pair_codes	Paired machines (only a hash of each device token), one-time pairing codes
api_keys	Lab API keys (only a SHA-256 hash of each key)
jobs	One row per piece of work: GPU, duration, price split. No lab code or data.
credits, payouts	Money in from labs, money out to contributors
network_hours, network_samples	Hourly totals and five-minute samples of GPUs online, for analytics

See Ledger and analytics for how these add up.