Bitcoin Forum

Hey guys, Me and my friend have really recently discovered bitcoin mining and were thinking of creating a Beowulf cluster to mine the bitcoins. We were thinking of a Pentium G630 for the master node and old processors from friends and multiple Radeon 7750's for all the slave nodes. We have a 3000w power supply and we were wondering if we had about 5-6 slave nodes if there would be any profit to be made until we could buy one of the Pc's made specifically for mining virtual currencies, can I get your guys input on our BWC mining idea?

CPU's are terribly inefficient as miners, you will consume a TON of power for little gain
check the bitcoin hardware wiki out: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

It compares GPUs and even CPUs

That would be why we're creating a gpu cluster. It's a major pain on their ass which is why I'm curious to know if it's worth it. Where we have the Beowulf cluster is literally down the street from the power plant so the electric bill would be nearly non existent.

I thought Beowulf cluster's were just for CPUs?

There is virtual gpu software that let's you setup gpu nodes and the master sees them all as one.

Sure, but there's no need for a master / slave setup.  Each node can submit shares independently, you're not running anything in parallel using MPICH or anything like that.

Beowulf clusters are of no benefit. Using mutiple computers for their GPUs is what most people would do, but they also put as many GPUs in each box as they can. Even old GPUs probably aren't cost effective. Because of the scaling of difficulty, the goal is to get as much work out of as little electricity as you can. One time costs can be recovered relatively easily, it is the recurring costs that are killers.