How do you know my hardware doesn't love me?

bitpop has reason to be suspicious.  I just show up and say "here is what I did!" so I got no problem with that.  It makes sense actually, but I gotta tell someone, somewhere.

I lost more on housing in 2008 but not that much.  The trick is that when you lose you try to take that lesson and make sure you lose better each and every time (I think Samuel Beckett said something like that). So yes, it was either this or buy a midlife crisis sports car.  Buying a midlife crisis sports car is an awful choice because middle aged men look ridiculous in them with wrinkly faces and bald spot flowing in the wind.

I've just decided to focus on what I know and if I fail I will just say "I was wrong" because it won't be the first time and I hope it won't be the last either because the only time we stop failing is when we are dead.

You are right in that if it ships I will be stuck with rigs that will not be totally worthless, but I will lose money on them.  I had an offer to lease them out for animation work but that won't pay for them.

You are also right about your prediction that someone will ship, but chip makers are a conservative lot and making and shipping chips that have the promise of having productivity halved in the future is something that makes them skittish.  Also combined with the possibility of a bitcoin crash (always possible) that too is likely to keep the chip production down.

So I jumped in while others were waiting.  I might lose a chunk of cash.  I might mine a ton of bitcoins and have the bitcoin crash on me.  ASIC rigs could end up fitting on wrists and generate "free money" for the wearers.  I don't know.  In fact, the economic modeling I do in my cluster really cannot tell me what will happen either since it has only been around since 2009 and really only been a currency for less time than that.  So my economic models say 0.00, which means I built a cluster that says I should never have built a cluster, but I still think it is a better bet than ASIC.

I stuck with what I know and that is crazy ass hardware.  I know 60k of ASIC would get me more power.  Man, 60K of ASIC would get me 3TH which would then make me buy a very large boat and sail to Richard Branson's island and kick him in the testicles.

But ASICs are not being delivered.  Avalons...yes, kinda.  But there is something in the "too good to be true" in the typical ASIC promises that seem to be filled with slowness at best and felons at worst that made me decide that if I was going to gamble I was going to do it on something I knew I could get my hands on.

How many ASIC rigs are out there right now do you think?

The number suggest it is the Godot of hardware and we can always replace lost money but we can never replace lost time.

As a basketball machine elf I beg to differ.

All I have to say is that you are a smarter man than I am.  Selling shovels during a gold rush always scores.

*hat tip*

I had my doubts before it started running But it is doing OK.  Not ASIC level but much better than projected (59GH per rig ) So yes, massive expense.  Butterfly Labs is a much better deal and all those people who have those much, much cheaper rigs than me sure are laughing at me now. (how many people is that?  two maybe?).

I know clusters.  I'm 48 years old and have been doing clusters since 2000.  I know financial data modeling and I know how to make this stuff sing and it has.  Not at ASIC level but much better than I thought it would.  Still, my loss or my profit, but I got my hardware delivered.

I am sure BFL will deliver their product right away, and be just as reputable as bASIC was, then I will be sorry.

I've gotten two rigs up in the last 24 hours but it is very likely not me since I assume 114 GH for two would not interfere like a mighty, mighty ASIC based machine would.

59 GH

Trying to use my CPU power now to crunch a model for optimizing pool hopping.  Still a long, long way from paying off my rig even assuming I can turn BTC into something to put in the bank.

I am starting to wish it was.  But I did take into account the speed difference.  We will see in my test tomorrow.  I might only lose half at this point if I part everything out on e-bay.

Ok.  Hmmm...  More to test when it gets set up then.

Crap.

I think I may have been a tad done in by hubris in thinking clusters are better at everything.

Do you think I could use my cluster for trolling and make some trollcoin with it?

It'd be nice if lack of pics could get me a refund.

But here we are.  Things happened.

Failover means that when , lets say, The State of Missouri is destroyed in an act of clumsiness typical of that state and my rig is destroyed with it, my other rig either surrenders half of its tasks and takes on the tasks of the dead Missouri rig or it takes over in full by creating more instances to make up for those lost.  This is why I need huge logging space because the failover rig will have to collect data from the failed rig.  The colos provide 24/7 AC and backup power so I figured I might as well take advantage of them. 

Redundant means they are the same and have the ability to failover.

Heh. You are probably correct.  But it is unique on the inside but really, really boring on the outside (quad 6U cases being driven to two racks somewhere now). 

The controller is *BSD.  The rest is CentOS.

Just to clarify I have 12 GPU cards.    I do things for failover and redundancy because that is how I set up everything that handles potential income.  It might be excessive but it is just a habit.

As far as ASIC goes,  How many people do you know personally with ASIC rigs? 

As far as my huge amount of memory, I will need that to run numerous instances.  One thing I am just checking out is the possibility of adding nodes even if I could virtualize an ASIC chip.  They have such low power useage and would take up low CPU and perhaps GPU cycles that if I can virtualize and ASIC instance , then maybe this rig would not be a waste of money.

My one test was a dismal failure at about 26600 Mh but I was testing on cracking phpBB3 hashes when I got that speed, so I will see for sure in a day or two.

Most likely this will be a bad investment though.  I can face that but I am going to look for ways to "hedge" a potential loss.

No pictures yet.  On the off chance this does work, I really don't want copycats with my rig chugging away at what could be my bitcoins.  If it works I might be open to "leasing" as part of my hedge plan.  Being that if it works, I lease instances as a hedge against BTC for dollars.

For the first commenter:  I'll let you know tomorrow.

For Ionux.  Maybe we should see how I do first before you start getting information from me.  I might suck

But seriously, Go with ATI / Radeon.  Its gotta be as open as possible.   What I am doing now is this:

Trying to tweak my system on a theoretical computing level.  That is why I have the BSD licensed controller, so I can protect my work.  The USA is lawsuit happy and if this works like I want it to work I want to make sure that someone does not file a suit for violating the GPL or something.

Before GPU mining I would advise you make a cluster.  If you can find some old VIA mini ITX boards you can have a low power 3 node cluster than can fit in an old case.  Those boards usually have one PCI slot to experiment with an old GPU.  You wont get a mining rig that will give you plenty o' bitcoin but you will learn how to make a cluster, learn Linux and learn how to tweak a GPU.  By doing this you will learn something that could even become a profession just in case the whole bitcoin thing turns out to be a fraud someday.

What I have to do with my clusters now is see if I can arrange for cluster leasing or something in case the whole bitcoin thing is nonsense and I end up getting stuck with $60k worth of future landfill.

and to top it off I made two of them.

I decided to go with GPU rather than with the non existent ASIC.  I see it as deciding to buy a v-8 sports car for $100k rather than wait for the $1k atomic powered flying sports car to be finished (like with BFL).

I work with both clusters and co-location, so I got a good deal on a massive amount of hardware and I got a good deal on coloco (air kept at 66F all day plus a staff).

My rigs are a cluster of 4 nodes each and one embedded *BSD licensed controller of my own design.  Each one has 8 8 core cpus, 512GB of RAM and 12 GPU cards with logging and storage done in an encrypted VIA Mini ITX controlling a storage array (so an error won't crash the system by filling up system disks).  The other rig is exactly the same, located in a different location with the same colo company and has hot failover capability with the other machine using something Linux HA heartbeat.  So if one rig fails it takes over the tasks of the other rig as its virtual instances switch tasks (why I needed so much RAM).

I really think I spent too much for this ($60k for both.  if I had not got the deal I did I would have paid about $90k) and tonight or tomorrow I should be able to start mining once it is set up at my colo.

The amount I spent is making me have doubts about bitcoin to be honest but I am here and I am obviously jumping all in.  So I figured I would introduce myself.

Hi!

My guess it is one person pretending to be a group of people.

Never concern yourself with the campaign of one person using pastebin.