Still, I wonder if there is some kind of financial or price-action analysis that a pool of GPUs would be good at. Monte Carlo simulations most probably as they can be parallelized very well. They are used to create probabilistic models and optimize complex portfolios. What if they mined when it wasn't being used or whatever? Surely they've heard of Bitcoin and if they already have the hardware, why not? Relative electricity costs would probably be next to nothing with such an efficient computer. It seems stupid for an investment company not to maximize their own investments. Assuming that they aren't doing it because they are too good for a nerdy currency is foolish.
For a number of reasons this is quite the opposite to maximizing profits. It has just too much overhead associated with it. |
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why don't they pay people to run computational finance crap on their GPUs? I mean if you pay more than people mine in BTC then those terahashes would be all theirs
Because it's not cost-effective. It would still be much more cheaper if they outsourced that to an external contractor that has a data center, high uptime and 24/7 support as compared to a swarm of semi-competent people. The overhead is much lower. There are also lots of privacy-related issues that may be resolved with a NDA with the contractor. |
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The obsession most mining people have with bitcoin is really fascinating. You people tend to overestimate the importance of bitcoin relative to the GPGPU and parallel processing as a whole. This leads to some absurd conspiracy theories like AMD research driven by bitcoin or bitcoin mining as driving force in new GPU sales. Reality is rather different. Computing resources thrown at bitcoin are very likely even less than those in SL3 unlocking. Assuming the average miner has 500MH/s at his disposal, the whole mining society would be comprised of less than 30.000 users. The amount of GPUs thrown at BTC mining is really insignificant doesn't matter how important it is to you. This is even more valid as far as FPGAs are concerned.
Unlike what you may think, there is something called "computational finance" and it has some embarassingly parallel applications, for example Monte Carlo simulations used for financial planning. The investment JPMorgan made for hardware would bring them much more profit if used for those tasks as opposed to bitcoin mining.
Also unlike what you think, corporate customers and universities are still way bigger market as far as GPGPU/FPGA niche is concerned as compared to hobbyist and semi-hobbyist uses like bitcoin mining and SL3 unlocking.
Bottom line: the universe does not revolve around you, sorry.
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It is seriously gonna happen, one way or another. Even it trends won't go as bad as I thought, once 7xxx are on market, there WOULD be lots of cheap GPUs for sale.
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It is in the SVN. BTW there are upcoming changes and hashkill would likely become dual-licensed. The "commercial" version is not targeting bitcoin, so I would continue to develop the plugin when I have more spare time for that. It's just that my focus (understandably) is being shifted to passcracking part, new algorithms and eventually distributing attacks. GPL'd version will follow those enhancements eventually. The problem is that I guess I won't have enough time for that bitcoin stuff. Anyone is free to fork it and do what he wants as long as GPL terms are followed. Sorry but password cracking is more interesting to me (and after all hashkill was designed to do that, the bitcoin plugin was kind of distraction and PoC work - just wanted to have a miner that suits my needs and reused code from the cracker).
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Don't know, need to investigate.
Unfortunately my priorities are now shifted towards implementing some DES-based password hashing algorithms on GPUs, so I won't be able to work on the bitcoin plugin in the near future.
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Any SDKs below 2.3 are not supported, sorry. They do not support OpenCL 1.1 features correctly and have significant problems with using multiple devices in a single process.
P.S if you chose to use 2.2 anyway, do not use -G4, but -G1. It should provide you better utilization.
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I found that your nice tool stalls when it looses connectivity.
If you don't define a pool list text file (and use -f file) on connection loss, it sleeps for 20-30 seconds then retries. If you have defined a pool list file, it just tries the next one without sleeping. It'd also be nice to have a socket spawn from hashkill that allows reading of basic program statistics, so we can develop our tools around yours.
This is not supported, however the bitcoin plugin exports statistics in a text file in json format (in ~/.hashkill/bitcoin.json). It'd also be awesome if hashkill had a switch to show all avail plugins
Use hashkill-gpu -p I've been searching for some tool that can use a GPU to get around salted MD5 ($1$, ya know:-D).
MD5(Unix) is not supported at present on GPUs. It is on CPUs though. The only tool I know of that supports it on GPUs is oclhashcat+ Still the question remains whether hashkill has native CUDA support.
No CUDA support, just OpenCL. Yes, CUDA tends to be faster, but I don't really care about 5-10% performance gains on NVidia platforms that require the whole codebase to be rewritten. If it was AMD, I would do that, but NVidia hardware just sucks in terms of integer ops. It's a waste of money and electricity for hash cracking, even when huge hashlists are to be cracked. |
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Server had problems...it should be available now.
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You don't need to use the mining proxy now. The failover functionality is built-in already.
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Hm interested in results with the latest version.
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What's your hardware, SDK version and catalyst version?
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OK, new release is here. What's new: * GPU drop problem should be fixed * Added pools stats for btcguild.com. Use -a <apikey> * Fixed a race condition situation which would submit more stale shares under certain circumstances * Added pool failover support. It is enabled by using the -f <inputfile> option. You create a text file in the following format: user:password:host:port user1:password1:host1:port1 ... then you run hashkill like this: hashkill -p bitcoin -f filename The end-result would be that once there are connection failures to a pool, we switch to the next one in the list. No time wasted on reconnection attempts. Download: 64bit: http://www.gat3way.eu/poc/hashkill-0.2.4-x86_64.tgz32-bit: http://www.gat3way.eu/poc/hashkill-0.2.4-x86.tgz |
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Is your hasher optimised for the 5000 series? I seem to get get less hash rate (50+) and also less shares per hour.
As compared to what? |
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OK think I found what causes that GPU drop. Also pool failover coming soon. I also found a small bug that potentially caused more stales under certain circumstances. Will release soon.
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Now seriously, given that network calc speed is 14TH and an overclocked 5970 does ~700MH/s, all it takes is 20.000 5970s. Surely, AMD and licensees produce significantly more than that. Now I know, not everyone who is mining bought new hardware to mine with. But really, you only have to look at ebay to see proof that mining really IS having a big effect on ATI video card prices. There are far better gaming cards than the 5870 out there, and yet, the 5870 is selling for much more than them on ebay. What other explanation could there be other than miners are buying them up so fast as to actually affect the price point (which you claim isn't possible)?
Most of those wonderful gaming cards does not have or have poor DP capabilities. 5870 has rather decent ones. The GPGPU niche is not about integer ops only, in fact most if it is not. That's a ridiculous statement. Newegg and Amazon didn't have any issues keeping 5830s in stock for quite some time before the bitcoin article came out on Yahoo at the beginning of this month. If mining stopped tomorrow, there would be a whole lot of GPUs on ebay...
The amount of 5830s on newegg and ebay is a ridiculous indicator. This card is inadequate for today's gaming and GPGPU needs. 5830 being very energy-effective card is a legend spread by people that have no idea what they are talking about. Yes, pricewise they are a deal, until you take into account the costs of additional pcie slots. So yes, I kinda start to believe bitcoin actually influence the GPU market in a way. Not the whole AMD GPU market, but e.g the old 5830s one  Likewise, if I had some old 5770s covered in dust in the warehouse, I would spread rumors about 5770s being much more efficient (and they actually _are_ in terms of MH/W and likely price/perf as compared to 5830). |
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Yeah and I can clearly see that "GPU drop" effect Gotta be some synchronization bug, I will have a look at that... |
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Hm, that's rather strange. I actually ship binaries statically linked with curl. However I disabled SSL support in curl as well as support for some unneeded protocols and compiled it myself. It's quite possible until you need SSL support. My attempts to build curl statically linked with libssl and libcrypto then build hashkill statically linked with curl failed as well.
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