Gridcoin Mining with 80kW of hydroelectric power (Phase 2)
My last (and first) post was about one month ago and got a lot of positive response and I promised to post again if there is something new on my project, so here I am:
Gridcoin-Mining is working very well for us now and we decided to go into Phase 2 and expand our computing power to about 6.5kW with additional 11 PCs (i5-8400, 1x AMD Radeon RX Vega 56, 1x Geforce 1080). I ordered the hardware about one month ago, but it seems that Intel is not able to produce enough of their new 6 core processors and also the RX Vega are very hard to get, I guess because of Ethereum Mining. But I wanted them for a better double precision performance on some projects like milkyway@home. I hope to get all parts till Christmas, so that's my wish for this year, but of course not exclusively (all the best to you and your families)!
Here is the picture of the hardware (just case, power supply, mainboard and SSD).
In order to manage all hosts and projects I've created (as said in my last blog) a small BOINC-managing tool based on apache, mysql, PHP using the boinccmd-tool on an RaspberryPi. At the moment it's far away from being perfect, but I am working on it in my free time and I think about to make it Open-Source if you are interested?! In order to do that I must rewrite the code (first of all variable names) and comments to english because right now it's a mixture of german and english ;-) I'll keep you up-to-date on that.
I've also decided to split all hosts into virtual hosts that consists each of one single device. So the first host with (i5-7400, 2x AMD Radeon RX Vega 56, 2x Geforce 1080) is now split into 1xCPU, 1xIntel-GPU, and each of the graphics card separated in one BOINC-Client on different ports. It's done by ignoring all other devices except one by editing the client configuration (http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Client_configuration) and running multiple BOINC clients. So it's easier to decide which project should run on which hardware device without entering the projects page itself and do it manually. And making a "real" BOINC-Account-Manager" with all the API stuff to overwrite project settings is a bit to much work for me now, but maybe we can do that in the community some time - an offline BAM for local Gridcoin Mining, let's see...
So that is my plan for the near future, be prepared for new updates ;-)
RX Vega 56 actually offers only 0.6 TFLOPS of FP64 perfomance. That's comparable to ancient HD5870, released in 2009.
I know, but it's the best value for that price today (and good FP32 performance too). But your cards are much better, but not produced anymore and also used not easy to get. I've checked that ;-)
Check out the firepro S9150 for your double precision requirements. These are old enterprise only graphics cards that I have seen slowly coming into circulation for cheap. 2.53 Tflops of FP64, 5.07 Tflops FP32
Yes, that could be an option, it has half the efficiency on FP32, but 4 times higher on FP64. Disadvantage is, that there is no fan and you have to build your own solution for that because it's a server-card. Or am I wrong?
Sorry for taking so long to respond, as it is passively cooled it will require the airflow of the front fans to blow air through, I have been looking to get a few for my server case build, but I am unsure of performance on a standard case.
You raise a very good point though
if you thinking about FP64 maybe you should check out used 7870 they have 0,7 tflops in fp64 and 3tflops in fp32, you can get them for around 100$ or if you want also better performance in fp32 you can check R9 290X they have 5,6tflops in fp32 and 0,7tflops in fp64 for about 150-200$.
They are cheaper to buy, but are used and without warranty. The overall efficiency (FP64/kWh) is equal or less than on current RX Vega 56, and much less on FP32, so that's not an real option.
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Wow this looks awesome!! What are you expecting to pay for electricity?
About 0.08€/kWh at the moment, but this depends on the subsidies from Austria. The price without subsidies would be about 0.03€/kWh, but that's too low, no one can operate a power station and earn money for that value, but that's the price on global market. I would like to know how much tax money is put into the energy lobby to get that low price... But that's another problem... At the other side you could say that (bitcoin) mining is sponsored by taxes indirectly, because they force a low energy price... I should not think about all this dependencies...
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