Bitcoin Forum

With efforts to make a GPU miner for Primecoin floundering (and I am skeptical it would even be more effective than a system with a good 64-bit X86 CPU and fast memory), I was wondering if using Parallela to build a Primecoin mining rig would work well.  It is low power, ideal for CPU intensive tasks, can easily add fast memory to it cheaply and is quiet and compact.  It is also infinitely expandable.

I was thinking of ordering: http://shop.adapteva.com/collections/parallella/products/parallella-cluster-kit
This was a kickstarter project.  Apparently they have already shipped boards to kickstarter contributors and sales to other customers will start in August.  Here is the page describing this project: http://www.adapteva.com/introduction/

It strikes me this would be good for any CPU intensive mining coin and Primecoin may be a great candidate for this.  

Thoughts?

I've been thinking of buying one just to play with, primecoin and possibly even scrypt coins might be efficient to mine on this. Its only $99 to order one, even if its not usefull to mine primecoin its a fun linux computer you can play with. I'll buy it just as a toy and if it is efficient in mining primecoins all the better. :D

Yeah, I think it will be pretty efficient and the fact it infinitely expandable is great.  Means you can play with one and then buy more if you like it to sequentially increase the power. 

I didn't buy it because of the TV thing... are we sure it would be fine to use it on your computer and super computer your computer instead of the TV?

I wouldn't want to overboard my PC and I don't know if our CPU is capable of handling it... It looks to be a standalone product.

It is by design meant to be able to easily be built up in parallel to infinitely increase the power (hence the name :) ).

I'm thinking this would make a good piece of hardware to hook up to my 3D printer. I can use it as the print server and have it do all the slicing for me. Or even mod it to completely control the 3D printer by adding stepper drivers.

No good for scrypt, primecoin should work.

The Parallela doesn't look that great for floating point operations, hashing, etc.  I would go with a Xeon Phi if I was you

Care to venture a guess at what something like this would be capable of?

http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?p=SY-74GRTPT&c=fr&pid=bd33f3bedf5496e23ff3cf7116596d12ea8d57decd4d9ff9d1f1455cd7c13848&gclid=COKTh__72LgCFa9fQgodnn8AqA

Looks like a barebones chassis w/ Mobo for a Xeon processor. you'd get a pretty good rate on it, but tbh it's more cost effective to buy a corei5 or corei7, slap it in a cheap chassis. Maybe $500 per unit if you price it right.

Even 7020 version with 512KB of RAM?  I bought that version a few days ago just for fun, mainly for Monte Carlo/Machine learning stuff, but I thought I'd give it a go for some scrypt mining. 

-Merc

When I tried to buy it just now it said the 7020 version isn't available. How did you buy it?

Edit: Had to select With GPIO also :P

The power consumption is just way too high and you would need the 1024 to achieve ok speeds but bad power again.

Way lower than GPUs and CPUs for the expected performance.  High compared to what?

Performance vs power consumption.  Iirc you would be paying in the neighborhood of 11 $/1khs

Don't waste your time or money. If you understood the technology you would know that it's not anywhere near powerful enough to be used to mine Primecoins more effectively than a Xenon. Sure you could give it a try but I think it's just not worth the expense for the very marginal gain.

Do you think a Xeon is better than a high end over clocked i7 processor?

With Primecoin it's hard to tell. I would think by design a Xeon is better but we'd have to do a test to find out which one actually generates more primes.

Stack up 100 of these together, and then we can talk. Untill then all i hear is nonsense  ::)

Anyone bought one of these? Please let us know! I'm willing to get wet with this project.

The (rather pessimistic) performance estimate for the parallella is from 2kh to 4kh per core, that's from 32Kh to 64kh for a 16 core board, consuming about 5w of power.
It's not that impressive but considering it's low wattage it could be worth a try.

Plus it is very inexpensive.  probably cheaper than leasing a dedicated server.

I paid for one, and I'm on the preorder list. I'm looking forward to play with it!!

I am very curious to see how it works - would seem like an ideal match on a price/xpm mining basis.

Please update is with info once you recieve one.

I wonder if this will still be cost-effective now that the gpu miner finally looks like it becoming a reality.

Sure! As soon as I get it.

I don't mind if it ends up being not cost-effective, I plan to use it for other things too.

I know - but it is so cheap relative to high-end GPUs, it might still be a better value.

Okay time to bookmark this. Have fun waiting  :P

Hi, post progress.
How you will use it?
CPU mining?

I'm going to buy one to test with mining cpu coins and if its not profitable it becomes my 3d printer host. It should be just as fast if not faster than my 8 core amd slicing stl's into gcode.

Can't you just use a raspberry pi as 3d printer host or too weak?

No need to bookmark, just "watch" the thread.

I can use it to host the printer but not to slice stl's. I have had some models take up to a half hour to slice on my 8 core amd. lol

I'm just waiting for mine to arrive from Kickstarter campaign - I'll let you know as soon as it arrives

I can also think of another project that might be fun with one of these.

Add a usb tv tuner and mythtv and you have a DVR with the processing power to convert to avi on the fly.

I think this can perform as good as a corei7 3770k when using the co-processors.

Ufffffffffffff.
Parralella is ARM base?
Works with an Linaro Linux?

I guess so. The hardware is not that rare. So you could easily get support.

The parallella board do have a dual ARM core, but the real deal of the parallella is it's 16 core coprocessor (Epiphany).
I am not that sure if it could have a good performance crunching prime chains since it is not the kind of job that benefits much of parallellization (correct me if I am wrong).

I agree. But remember the settings of primeminers that you can specify how many threads to bind? Maybe it could have a good impact.

Here's a benchmark i found:
http://www.adapteva.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/coremark3.jpg

The Coremark benchmark is not a floating point benchmark, it's main focus is read/write operations, integer operations, and control operations.  Generally speaking the Epiphany coprocessor was designed to do floating point math very quickly.  This test is probably not really a 100% good representation of it's ability of doing integer ops, due to it being biased by other external factors (read/write etc).

The Epiphany 3 with 16 cores has a core mark of: 19478 and costs $99
The Intel Xeon Processor E5-2687W has a core mark of: 400116 and costs $1890 plus say another $400 for a computer build: ~$2290

20 Epiphany 3s would be about the same speed as that Xeon.  and if you built that using their cluster kits, it would cost. ~2875.

Granted you could probably build two or three computers with more total computing power and cheaper than using that insane Xeon, and probably get your costs down even further.

Furthermore, unless you are a coder, you are going to have a bad time.  You won't be able to just drop the primecoin miner into a paralella and hit go.  There will need to be some code rewriting and optimizations done to the code, at very least you will have to significantly edit the make file to make it compile for the coprocessor.

The Epiphany 4 with 64 cores that is not yet available on the other hand has a core mark of: 78748.80 but the price is unknown, as well as the availability.

So right now, i would say No, i don't think the Parallela is a good bet.

The Coremark benchmark is not a floating point benchmark, it's main focus is read/write operations, integer operations, and control operations.  Generally speaking the Epiphany coprocessor was designed to do floating point math very quickly.  This test is probably not really a 100% good representation of it's ability of doing integer ops, due to it being biased by other external factors (read/write etc).

The Epiphany 3 with 16 cores has a core mark of: 19478 and costs $99
The Intel Xeon Processor E5-2687W has a core mark of: 400116 and costs $1890 plus say another $400 for a computer build: ~$2290

20 Epiphany 3s would be about the same speed as that Xeon.  and if you built that using their cluster kits, it would cost. ~2875.

Granted you could probably build two or three computers with more total computing power and cheaper than using that insane Xeon, and probably get your costs down even further.

Furthermore, unless you are a coder, you are going to have a bad time.  You won't be able to just drop the primecoin miner into a paralella and hit go.  There will need to be some code rewriting and optimizations done to the code, at very least you will have to significantly edit the make file to make it compile for the coprocessor.

The Epiphany 4 with 64 cores that is not yet available on the other hand has a core mark of: 78748.80 but the price is unknown, as well as the availability.

So right now, i would say No, i don't think the Parallela is a good bet.

[/quote]
Excellent post! I guess I will stick to the VPS route until the Epiphany 4s come out and see what the price/performance trade-off is there.  Hopefully if it makes sense price/performance, and the gpu miner is not refined to be much more efficient than it currently is, an experienced coder with re-work primecoin miner for the parallela.

Wow you can beat a Corei5 with 99$ computer! That's insane! :o

The Epiphany running 16 threads beats the i5 running one thread but loses to the i5 running two threads.

when you guys receiving your order?   ;D

According to their website:
Shipping begins in October.  And all pending orders should be shipped by end of October.

thx for the info   ;D

It's good to know that a lot of people are interested with parallela. ;D

It has huge potential especially as the cost comes down for CPU intensive tasks without the need for a full system

Yeah this makes me want to have one and try to make a cpu rig out of it. :D

Just don't try gaming on it;)

Hahahaha I won't. I'll just make the cluster a host for my cloud server rented out locally. :D

I hope it lives up to the hype.  I'm going to wait to get some feedback and then I'll take the plunge.

I agree.

Want to help Primecoin Network Expand to the masses of Computer/Tech/Science Enthusiasts ?   

I am looking for others with Twitter Accounts to give us a hand here in getting Primecoin Media/Press attention.

Find out how to get involved @ https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=305956 and follow http://twitter.com/Primecoiner

We will start tweeting soon, and need you, a supporter, to help us ReTweet the message!

Anyone succeed in mining with it ?

anyone already tested it ?

I know this is a somewhat old thread, but as its now the new year, did anyone get their Parallela's?

If so how are they?

I'm still waiting :(

no updates??  ;D

Hmm, must be a lot of backlog then, site mentions thats why no one can order one atm. :(

sales open ;)

anyone tries it for cpu coins?