Bitcoin GPU-based Mining Machines good for BOINC / SETI?

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Ian&Steve C.
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Message 1969753 - Posted: 10 Dec 2018, 12:45:34 UTC - in response to Message 1969731.  

What did you buy, Tom?
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Message 1969760 - Posted: 10 Dec 2018, 14:05:50 UTC - in response to Message 1969753.  
Last modified: 10 Dec 2018, 14:16:28 UTC

What did you buy, Tom?


Two different one slot to 4 slot expansion boards. If I understand it right one of them is a single board the other is separate boards one for each gpu. One uses a single USB 3.0 cable connection (unless it doesn't, I can't remember without looking up the silly order again) the other has 4 connectors off the slot board. I also have a psu adapter set so I can power the cards with a 2nd psu.

The current plan (if/when all the hardware gets here) is to use my "cheap" X79 MB as the target test bed. I will be stealing errr borrowing GPU cards from "several" other systems. I have a total of 3 750ti's and 6 1060's laying around here so in theory I could test all the way up to 9 gpus. With one exception, all my other boxes can crunch cpu tasks and still have video access w/o the cards. I have a "spare" card that also can't crunch so if it goes all the way to 9 (unlikely, I admit) I can still run cpu crunching on all the other boxes.

Once I have satisfied my urge to experiment, I expect nearly all the cards will end up back in their original systems.

I am almost certain I will discover nothing new but didn't want to buy another MB/cpu for the experiment. So I am using one of my LGA 2011 MB's to drive it.

I remember you stating that these kind of cards are only good for expanding 2 gpu cards / slot, otherwise they slow down. So I am not hopeful for a great result. I just want to bump up against the gpu card limit myself :)

Version two of the experiment would be to try it out on one or the other of my high end boxes. In any case I didn't want to invest in Lga 1051(?) hardware when I have all this lga 2011/TR2 hardware laying around here. Not really sure if I want to try that or not. Need to understand/experience version 1 first :)

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Ian&Steve C.
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Message 1969770 - Posted: 10 Dec 2018, 15:10:34 UTC - in response to Message 1969760.  

ok, good luck.

just keep in mind that some of those old boards aren't provisioned to work with many GPUs even if you use expanders. the limit usually comes down to how many devices the BIOS can see or address memory for. you may not be able to get it to boot with 9 cards. maybe it will, but don't be surprised if it doesnt.
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Message 1969816 - Posted: 10 Dec 2018, 21:00:33 UTC - in response to Message 1969770.  

ok, good luck.

just keep in mind that some of those old boards aren't provisioned to work with many GPUs even if you use expanders. the limit usually comes down to how many devices the BIOS can see or address memory for. you may not be able to get it to boot with 9 cards. maybe it will, but don't be surprised if it doesnt.


I sure won't be surprised. I know it will boot with 2 gpus, but beyond that it will be a "Christmas present" if it even gets to 6.

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Message 1969847 - Posted: 11 Dec 2018, 0:10:55 UTC - in response to Message 1968742.  

You're right. This isn't any way to spend anyones free time. Too much Drama. So, I've decided to go find Jason and hang with him for a while.
Just list those few remaining Linux Apps of mine the same as the PPAs, unsupported and untrusted.
Don't forget to thank Ian&Steve C. for my decision.
No One in their right mind would tolerate this scenario.
Good Luck. Bye now.


. . Does that mean you are contemplating a trip to the land of OZ? If so, look me up and I'll buy you a beer ...

. . Either way hang loose and try to have fun ...

Stephen

< Don't worry be happy! >
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Message 1971833 - Posted: 24 Dec 2018, 15:05:40 UTC

Hey swim fans!

I got the Gigbyte Fintech working on 9 cards but it wasn't easy. I have found one poor performing PCI slot on the MB!
Seems pretty stable but it wont let me get 10 cards on board.
I've tried all combinations of cards, risers, cables and slots and I cat get 10 working.

I have the ASUS MB back from warranty service (No trouble found) so I might try that today.

Keep the faith.

Tom's multi GPU idea sounds interesting!

Happy holidays
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Message 1971836 - Posted: 24 Dec 2018, 15:48:01 UTC

I suspect that the remaining open 3 PCI slots have issues on the MB...
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Ian&Steve C.
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Message 1971844 - Posted: 24 Dec 2018, 16:37:09 UTC - in response to Message 1971836.  
Last modified: 24 Dec 2018, 16:41:57 UTC

very possible. like i mentioned to you offline, some of these mining boards just have issues. they aren't built to be super durable. i feel like companies tend to cheap out on them to keep costs low to appeal to the miners. miners don't need super fast PCIe lanes, they can run it on gen 1, which is really easy on the hardware.

one thing that's also likely plaguing many people trying to run GPU's on risers, is the USB cables. they can be pretty poor quality, and not assembled or shielded well enough to handle full PCIe gen3. leading to cards dropping out or not being detected by the system, even causing system hangs. if you want more reliable function with USB risers, replace the USB cables with better quality ones. it will fix a lot of these kinds of problems.

looks like you're the last remaining person running a mining board (that i know of). but i would be happy just leaving it at 9 GPUs. if you really want you can try to split a PCIe lane with one of those splitters, but you might see a slowdown in performance. give it a shot if you really want. but i think I'd be happy to have 9 stable. it should get you up to around 360,000 RAC.

when/if i build another system with multi-GPU (>7), i'll just use a more robust board, like the SuperMicro X9DRX+-F board i previously mentioned. but it's a rare board, and hard to find for less than $600.
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Message 1972125 - Posted: 27 Dec 2018, 8:50:06 UTC

To underline what Ian&Steve has just said....
Cast your mind back to my post early in December where I described the woes with trying to use mining boards to support very high-end GPUs. One of the hardware engineers obviously had a bit too much time on his hands and he has dismantled one of the "good" mining boards and a couple of the "bad" ones, they were allegedly the same make, type and version, but he found differences in a number of the layer layouts around the routing of the data channels. As a board (bored??) designer he found this strange so tried a bit of modelling on these differences and found that each "set" had advantages and some quite major disadvantages. All would work when very lightly stressed, some would work very well on bursty data, while most would fail, and booting would be "random". Also one of the "bad" boards had a very poor power-layer layout that may not have been able to supply sufficient power to the whole board without running hot in places (not quite his actual words...).
So, there's a little bit of proof that mining boards are very variable, and possibly some of the causes, which explains the things you guys are seeing.
Bob Smith
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Message 1972168 - Posted: 27 Dec 2018, 16:55:10 UTC - in response to Message 1972125.  

Yep. I agree. The only way to find a good one is to develop some sort of PCI analyzer, buy your board of interest, and test each lane. If you find a lane that cant run full speed, send it back before you try this. The deal about the 9 GPU limit in my case is hard to postulate on but it exists nonetheless. At least i can get 9 GPU's all churning in the hunt for the little green men!
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Message 1972639 - Posted: 30 Dec 2018, 16:25:17 UTC

I guess my last statement was politically incorrect.

They might not be green...
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Message 1972640 - Posted: 30 Dec 2018, 16:25:34 UTC

For that matter, they might not be male...
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Message 1972660 - Posted: 30 Dec 2018, 18:48:40 UTC - in response to Message 1972640.  

For that matter, they might not be male...


So live a little. maybe they are "little green persons" :)

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Message 1972662 - Posted: 30 Dec 2018, 18:59:02 UTC

https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_host_detail.php?hostid=8632753

Is smoking along on 9 purely gtx 1060 3GB's (I think).

I wonder if you set the command line to "-nobs" which I suspect you did, then reboot after renaming the app_config.xml if it would run at the same speed?

If it does, that means you could start some CPU crunching too? I am assuming you aren't but I haven't done an exhaustive search of your tasks, only looked at the details area which doesn't show CPU tasks being processed.

Look at your task manager first though. If without the "app_config.xml" file it is still pegging above 95% you probably don't have enough CPU cycles to also crunch some seti tasks without slowing everything down.

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Message 1972664 - Posted: 30 Dec 2018, 19:03:25 UTC

Hurray! Your 9 gpu machine is on the 2nd page of the Leaderboard. Welcome back to the "top" ;)

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Message 1972847 - Posted: 31 Dec 2018, 20:54:20 UTC

Yep. All 9 on the mining rig. Got myself a nice 5 GPU "Dell" farm running too! I'm letting them run one core and one 1060.

Glad to be back.
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Message 1972976 - Posted: 1 Jan 2019, 16:26:53 UTC

So if my post New Years celebration brain is right, I got 18 1060 GPU's crunching Seti now!
The two PC's with the AMD cards will eventually become my computing PC's in my lab.
I lost count of the cores I'm running... I thinks its something like 80 or so...
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Message 1972991 - Posted: 1 Jan 2019, 17:38:50 UTC - in response to Message 1972976.  

So if my post New Years celebration brain is right, I got 18 1060 GPU's crunching Seti now!
The two PC's with the AMD cards will eventually become my computing PC's in my lab.
I lost count of the cores I'm running... I thinks its something like 80 or so...


"MORE CORES" :)
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Message 1973126 - Posted: 3 Jan 2019, 3:37:18 UTC - in response to Message 1972847.  

Yep. All 9 on the mining rig. Got myself a nice 5 GPU "Dell" farm running too! I'm letting them run one core and one 1060.

Glad to be back.


I just did a rough calculation for your 9 gpu rig. I think you should end up in the vicinity of 300,000 RAC.

(1440 / 2.3 min per task) * 9 gpus * 55 credit per task = ~ 300,000

This doesn't include the time between tasks etc. So it's not going to be even close to exact.

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Message 1973225 - Posted: 3 Jan 2019, 16:21:51 UTC

Thanks for the acid test Tom. It will be nice to see it go.
Unfortunately, the I often find the system frozen every morning like I did this morning.

I wish I had a tool that can monitor my machines and send me an email when they are not heard from for a period of time...
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Message boards : Number crunching : Bitcoin GPU-based Mining Machines good for BOINC / SETI?


 
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