Bitcoin Forum

If you have 100 desktop workstations all dedicated 100% to mining 24x7 what would be the most effective way to manage the setup?  I have full access to the machines and can install andy OS, LiveCD, Linux etc that is required. The setup is completely customizable.  I see a lot of talk about using a 'pooled' mining service but I figure with100 systems that I'd be better solo mining; but I could be wrong.  I'm not looking to spend weeks configuring a complex solo setup.  If a pooled mining group will give me my fair share of return based on the number of systems I'm utilizing then I'm open to it.   Any recommendations on how to get the best return out of a large setup like this?

Thanks

First question I would ask is, what OS/distro are you running?  I current run 36 machines that I manage setup with chef and pssh for various tasks.

The systems are currently running Windows 7 OS however I can install any OS that is required and or even boot using a LiveCD or USB stick if that is a more efficient option.  I'm am starting this from scratch so all options are on the table.  I have some experience with Linux but am not a expert.

It all depends on what you want to mine also. Solo mining bitcoin, unless you have 1+ THs then you're better off in a pool. Alt coins on the other hand can be mined solo depending on the current difficulty.

Are you wanting to do scrypt or sha-256?

I set up solo for alt coins with my blades using bfgminer as a proxy so I don't overload *coin-qt

Michael 

Will this just CPU mining or do the machines have a usable GPU?

Always imagined be nice to be the sysadmin at pixar running some BTC between movie renders ;-)

I would imagine if Pixar solo mined they would hold 51% or more on the network.

If I join a pool can I create one account and simply install the software on each individual machine using the same account information?  From there will it aggregate the work of all 100 machines to that one account?


All of the desktop machine have PCIe stand-alone graphics cards mostly 512MB/ 1GB dedicated VRAM on each.

Yeah that wouldn't be a problem, hell you could use bitminter and use the java app that they have or use bfgminer , cgminer

That actually might be your best route if you want to mine BTC

Michael

Looks like BitMinter uses a proportional rewards system which I've read is the worst.

I found this quote to from a 2011 report on the different reward systems.  Is this still accurate today?

"Proportional: The block reward is distributed among miners in proportion to the
number of shares they submitted in a round. The expected reward per share depends
on the number of shares already submitted in the round, so hoppers will receive much
more than their fair share and steady miners will earn much less. This is the worst
reward system and must not be used."

The fees or pplns are usually lower than pps. BTC Guild charges 7% for PPS, but they also have PPLNS. Slush's pool uses a different system.

Biggest thing is find a pool you like. You can use slush's stratum proxy to point all 100+ machins to the proxy and the proxy connects to whatever pool you want.

You can run bfg miner on all the other machines and just point it to the proxy.

This will reduce network congestion.
 

You should mine in a pool. The benefit of mining in a pool is consistent revenue. Mining solo would be a disappointment because 100 GPUs is an insignificant portion of the overall hash rate, and it would be a very very long time (on average) between blocks.

Do you know what your total hash rate is? You can look up your GPU here and multiply it by 100: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

Without knowing specifics about your systems, here are my back-of-the-enveloipe estimates for you. I estimate your total hash rate to be somewhere between 20 GH/s and 70 GH/s, and you should see between revenue of between 0.5 BTC and 3.5 BTC over the next year. Your computers will use around 30 kW to 50 kW, for a total of 250 MWH to 450 MWH over the next year. At $0.10 per kWH, you power cost will be $25,000 to $45,000. Please check my math. You are going to lose a lot of money.

Just out of curiosity, if you eliminated the cost of electric would you still feel that a pool would be more productive than solo?

The benefit of mining in a pool is consistent revenue, and you generally pay a small fee for that consistency (2%-7%). If you mine solo, it could be several years before you mine your first block at 70 GH/s.

The more I look into things it seems that GPU mining for Bitcoins is dead.   I'm starting to think using the 100 workstation GPUs to mine Litecoin will be a more profitable venture.

I came to the same conclusion. The big time competition is just to extreme. I'm trying to figure out where the cutoff is, but with Butterfly and other makers releasing that kind of gear, minimum investment for even a hobby setup is in the thousands, and getting worse.

Maybe you should better mine some other alt-coin. The difficulty of LTC is increasing rapidly for the past months as well.

In the times when I mined BTC on several rigs I used BAMT LiveCD distro, because there was a nice feature to monitor and manage all rigs from one place.. you could easily set primary / fall back mining pools at each rig, everything was automatic.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=65915.0

there is also a BAMT version for litecoin mining