Elmer saying hi!

Bought some coinage before the mtgox debacle.
Got them into my own wallet and securely encrypted and offline.
Thanks to all who contributed to the "store your wallet securely" thread!

Still crunching the numbers to see if my own mining rig it worth it, or just a hobby to throw money at! 

Sadly, if there really were some kind of AMD and Satoshi conspiracy (as BkkCoins suggests), it was poorly planned. AMD's evil plan to sell more GPUs has done nothing to help their stock price! Lackluster performance since the start of the year, and just plain awful in June.

OK, I think I'm getting the picture. Part of my problem is just the new terminology.

Is this right then....

One GPU runs one miner (one instance of mining software).
One "Mining Rig" with 3x 6990 cards would be running six miners.
10 mining rigs heating up my basement would be running 60 miners total.

Since there all under my control this would essentially be my own private pool.
All of the miners would do the "getwork" protocol business with my own bitcoin server that would dole out the work
and the bitcoin server keep track of the blocks that the miners all work on.
So  somehow my bitcoin server divides out the work, and all my 60 miners are solving the same block.

But in the bigger, worldwide picture, does that mean that all miners in the entire world are working on the same block?
That would seem to be true if the blocks must be solved and chained in sequence.

Then the whole worldwide mining process would devolve into a giant hardware/software "arms race" where whomever has biggest and fastest pool of miners can collect all the coins.  For example an evil consortium could assemble a pool of 2^32 miners and be done really really fast 

Sound like little guy solo miners have a pretty slim chance at this.

I've been lurking around a while trying to figure this all out...

My understanding is that the search space to find the right nonce for a single block is 2^32 in size.
The nonce is generated, the hash computed, and if the hash is less than the difficulty target then that nonce is a winner.
Is that the simple version?

But, I don't get how multiple GPUs work to solve a search for a single block. Say I have 3 6990s burning up watts.
Then I have 6 GPUs working on the mining problem.  Are they all working on the same block together or are they all working on different blocks?

I can understand how they'd all work on different blocks simultaneously, they'd each march through the 2^32 search space trying incremental nonces in a brute force approach.

But for them to all work together on a single block would imply some partitioning of the search space so that each GPU would never duplicate the work of another. Yet I never see any discussion of a "work manager/controller" piece of software that parcels out the search space to the "n" GPUs that a miner might be running. What's up?
Am I missing something?

Again, I'm just thinking about solo mining with multiple GPUs right now. I'm not ready to think about/discuss pooled mining and how that must work! 

Maybe this is a noob topic but I just don't get it.
Thanks.