can Asic miners be used with Seti@home?

Message boards : Number crunching : can Asic miners be used with Seti@home?
Message board moderation

To post messages, you must log in.

AuthorMessage
chrisV

Send message
Joined: 5 Jun 00
Posts: 1
Credit: 10,914,057
RAC: 0
United States
Message 1639362 - Posted: 9 Feb 2015, 16:10:12 UTC

Can any of the Asics Bitcoin miners be used to crunch Seti data?
ID: 1639362 · Report as offensive
Profile HAL9000
Volunteer tester
Avatar

Send message
Joined: 11 Sep 99
Posts: 6534
Credit: 196,805,888
RAC: 57
United States
Message 1639365 - Posted: 9 Feb 2015, 16:13:21 UTC - in response to Message 1639362.  
Last modified: 9 Feb 2015, 16:14:47 UTC

Can any of the Asics Bitcoin miners be used to crunch Seti data?

Simple answer. No. ASIC: Application Specific Integrated Circuit
One would have to be made for the type of calculations that SETI@home does.
SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[
ID: 1639365 · Report as offensive
Profile Jord
Volunteer tester
Avatar

Send message
Joined: 9 Jun 99
Posts: 15184
Credit: 4,362,181
RAC: 3
Netherlands
Message 1639412 - Posted: 9 Feb 2015, 18:31:52 UTC

But then, when you see a server farm such as the one in this video (that's one farm out of six!) do all that work to mine 25 Bitcoins a day, you may wonder if it's even worth the electricity these days to try to mine some.
ID: 1639412 · Report as offensive
kittyman Crowdfunding Project Donor*Special Project $75 donorSpecial Project $250 donor
Volunteer tester
Avatar

Send message
Joined: 9 Jul 00
Posts: 51468
Credit: 1,018,363,574
RAC: 1,004
United States
Message 1639415 - Posted: 9 Feb 2015, 18:41:18 UTC - in response to Message 1639412.  

But then, when you see a server farm such as the one in this video (that's one farm out of six!) do all that work to mine 25 Bitcoins a day, you may wonder if it's even worth the electricity these days to try to mine some.

If it were that profitable to do so, it would be on everybody's agenda.
And if everybody could do it, the value of a bitcoin would drop.
I suppose somebody getting the electricity from solar or wind power might be more able to justify bitcoin mining.

There is simply no free lunch.
"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

ID: 1639415 · Report as offensive
Richard Haselgrove Project Donor
Volunteer tester

Send message
Joined: 4 Jul 99
Posts: 14649
Credit: 200,643,578
RAC: 874
United Kingdom
Message 1639426 - Posted: 9 Feb 2015, 19:16:44 UTC - in response to Message 1639412.  

But then, when you see a server farm such as the one in this video (that's one farm out of six!) do all that work to mine 25 Bitcoins a day, you may wonder if it's even worth the electricity these days to try to mine some.

You don't have to visit 'a secret mine hidden away in North East China' - there are mines, franchises even, like MegaBigPower in Washington State (and Poland), or KnC Miner in Sweden.

I got those two from what feels like a sober and responsible survey of the BitCoin phenomenon in last week's New Scientist magazine (a popular and accessible, but reputable, science weekly publication in the UK). Some of the figures seem dubious, like the assertion that the coin mining network, in total, now controls 4 million petaflops of computing power: I think they must use the same conversion factors as CreditNew for converting the basically integer operations of a miner into flops.

You'd need more than a few solar cells on the roof to keep up with those guys. MBP located in WA to be near a hydro plant on the Columbia river: KnC is right near the Artic circle for cooling, but still had to fly in 66 tons of heatsinks by airfreight, so they could crunch before the value dropped again.

New Scientist's article is tricked out in California Gold Rush typography, and the comparison feels about right. Remember that the only people who come out of a gold rush with a profit are the folks who sell shovels.
ID: 1639426 · Report as offensive
Profile HAL9000
Volunteer tester
Avatar

Send message
Joined: 11 Sep 99
Posts: 6534
Credit: 196,805,888
RAC: 57
United States
Message 1639435 - Posted: 9 Feb 2015, 19:38:56 UTC - in response to Message 1639362.  

Can any of the Asics Bitcoin miners be used to crunch Seti data?

If you have some ASIC miners you wanted to use to aide SETI@home you could configure them to run http://www.bitcoinutopia.net/bitcoinutopia/index.php & Choose campaign #5 for SETI@home funding.
SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[
ID: 1639435 · Report as offensive
Profile Jord
Volunteer tester
Avatar

Send message
Joined: 9 Jun 99
Posts: 15184
Credit: 4,362,181
RAC: 3
Netherlands
Message 1639477 - Posted: 9 Feb 2015, 21:00:13 UTC - in response to Message 1639415.  
Last modified: 9 Feb 2015, 21:01:05 UTC

If it were that profitable to do so, it would be on everybody's agenda.

Thus far, at a 4,000+ Bitcoins per month for each farm (so times 6), it's been pretty profitable for these guys (a monthly gross of $1.5 million). Their only cost, $80,000 a month for electricity and the machines (but saying nothing about them, what's in them). I think that's the thing that stops most of us dead in our tracks.

Nothing said about the 4 man crew that eat, live and sleep there on the server floor to keep track of everything and step in to go fix things when they break.

Too bad they didn't really say what they run inside those servers, although they did look to me like 4 Teslas.
ID: 1639477 · Report as offensive
Profile HAL9000
Volunteer tester
Avatar

Send message
Joined: 11 Sep 99
Posts: 6534
Credit: 196,805,888
RAC: 57
United States
Message 1639481 - Posted: 9 Feb 2015, 21:15:37 UTC - in response to Message 1639477.  

If it were that profitable to do so, it would be on everybody's agenda.

Thus far, at a 4,000+ Bitcoins per month for each farm (so times 6), it's been pretty profitable for these guys (a monthly gross of $1.5 million). Their only cost, $80,000 a month for electricity and the machines (but saying nothing about them, what's in them). I think that's the thing that stops most of us dead in our tracks.

Nothing said about the 4 man crew that eat, live and sleep there on the server floor to keep track of everything and step in to go fix things when they break.

Too bad they didn't really say what they run inside those servers, although they did look to me like 4 Teslas.

Coin ASICs are much cheaper & faster for mining than GPU based hardware. A High end GPU like a Tesla might eek out 200K hashes/s. Versus a USB stick ASIC that runs 2G hashes/sec & costs around $30.
SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[
ID: 1639481 · Report as offensive
Profile Jord
Volunteer tester
Avatar

Send message
Joined: 9 Jun 99
Posts: 15184
Credit: 4,362,181
RAC: 3
Netherlands
Message 1639488 - Posted: 9 Feb 2015, 21:48:38 UTC - in response to Message 1639481.  

A High end GPU like a Tesla might eek out 200K hashes/s. Versus a USB stick ASIC that runs 2G hashes/sec & costs around $30.

I said that they looked like Teslas to me, I didn't say they were. And apparently they aren't. In the video there's speak of those 900 broken Avalons, which are 40nm ASICs.

Seeing how they have 900 broken ones and they're earning 4,050 BTC a month, I don't think they'll have trouble paying the 13 BTC that Avalon is asking for 2,500 of their second generation units.
ID: 1639488 · Report as offensive
Profile Andrew Hughes
Avatar

Send message
Joined: 11 Jan 15
Posts: 11
Credit: 127,905
RAC: 0
United States
Message 1639985 - Posted: 11 Feb 2015, 2:12:55 UTC - in response to Message 1639477.  

If it were that profitable to do so, it would be on everybody's agenda.

Thus far, at a 4,000+ Bitcoins per month for each farm (so times 6), it's been pretty profitable for these guys (a monthly gross of $1.5 million). Their only cost, $80,000 a month for electricity and the machines (but saying nothing about them, what's in them). I think that's the thing that stops most of us dead in our tracks.

Nothing said about the 4 man crew that eat, live and sleep there on the server floor to keep track of everything and step in to go fix things when they break.

Too bad they didn't really say what they run inside those servers, although they did look to me like 4 Teslas.

They're asic boxes
probably around $7000-$10000 if my current guesses are correct
now if they get the dies made for them(very well might) it could be 2/3s of that price
Also their income spiked this year as other mining firms have gone out of business, lowering network difficulty(and what made the price drop below 200)
ID: 1639985 · Report as offensive
Profile Andrew Hughes
Avatar

Send message
Joined: 11 Jan 15
Posts: 11
Credit: 127,905
RAC: 0
United States
Message 1639988 - Posted: 11 Feb 2015, 2:15:34 UTC

Also to be fair(sorry I can't see how to edit posts) you could squeeze out ~5ghashes/day from a newer 7970/7870/piticam/hawaii amd card
Nvidia cards are historically slower at mining, but are much better for particle simulation
Recently nvidia did up the ante on parallel computing but in the end mining bitcoin with gpus is dead, same with altcoins
ID: 1639988 · Report as offensive

Message boards : Number crunching : can Asic miners be used with Seti@home?


 
©2024 University of California
 
SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.