Core concepts

The vocabulary below is used consistently throughout these docs and in the Portal.

The fabric

Thatch is a decentralised distributed data center: a fleet of independently-owned machines — in substations, towers, and homes — presented as one coordinated region. Nodes are not assumed to be trustworthy; the control plane is what makes the pooled result dependable.

Node

A single participating machine. Each node runs an agent that registers it, reports its capacity, health, and power, and executes the work scheduled onto it. Nodes are heterogeneous: they differ in architecture, accelerators, and available resources.

Control plane

The coordinating layer. It owns registration, scheduling and routing, billing, and residency enforcement. As a customer you only ever talk to the control plane’s API — never to a node directly.

Job

A unit of submitted work, with requirements attached (what it needs to run on). The scheduler decides placement; the job then carries a state and, on completion, an exit result.

Region and residency

Work is pinned to a region so data stays inside the jurisdiction you selected. See Data residency.