Building a Dedicated Super 'Node' - Crypto Accelerator Cards etc.

[BitcoinFX]

Lets design and specify components for building Dedicated 'Super' Bitcoin Nodes.

All aspects considered chipsets, CPU, design, power saving, cost saving, green tech. OS, security etc. etc.

Sun Crypto Accelerator 6000 PCIe Card

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/networking/031146.htm

More links soon... discuss...

[1714846421]

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[The Madhatter]

The board you mention looks very sweet. The name of the game here is cheap and abundant. Lots of super nodes at a low cost.

I was thinking of these boards actually:

http://www.soekris.com/vpn1401.htm

You can stuff 4-6 of them in each machine (depends on the motherboard you are using) and round-robin the crypto operations. (Open/FreeBSD can do this already for the HiFn chip.)

4 would be $288/server (1000Mbps of operations)
6 would be $426/server (1500Mbps of operations)

[theymos]

Neither of those cards support SHA-256.

I would want to test several CPUs to see which has the best hashes-to-watts ratio. I suspect that a few modern CPUs would actually be better than a lot of old ones, but I'm not sure. All each node would need is a motherboard, CPU(s), and 512MB of RAM. They can boot from the network.

[SmokeTooMuch]

the new core i7 have RSA-acceleration, not sure whether SHA takes advantages of this.

[The Madhatter]

Hmm.. I didn't notice that. They will still perform the public/private key stuff. The SHA-256 functions can be performed on the host CPU. The cards would offload most of the processing.

I guess it boils down to best bang for the buck. Some benchmarks and pricing would need to be worked out to find the best fit.

[Xunie]

I guess it boils down to best bang for the buck.

Note: we also need to keep in mind the energy usage of each part, just sayin'.

[The Madhatter]

Yup. Keeping it "green" is a good idea. Just be sure to use an 80-plus or 90-plus power supply, low power CPU, etc.

[BitcoinFX]

I'm based in the UK. Here are a few innovative companies that I'm considering using when I implement and migrate some of my services.

Green Tech. ( Energy Saving / Custom Builds etc. )

Very PC - http://www.very-pc.co.uk/

Green ISP - http://www.greenisp.net/

Please post similar links for your countries / region


P.S. What Linux OS do you side towards ? Ubuntu, Open SUSE, BSD, Other ? http://distrowatch.com/

[Xunie]

BitcoinFX, I suggest using LFS (Linux From Scratch) to build a netboot image that when it generates a new block, it will send it to an bitcoin address or IP.
But that's just me.
(PS: It would be nice if someone created a bitcoin farmer/miner that does not run under a kernel but runs directly on the hardware, might improve speed!)

[thufir]

That's awesome Xunie. It will happen. Also, I bet you this wont be far to follow: Bot nets of compromised machines generating and sending bitcoins anonymously to their master.

[BitcoinFX]

These 'combo' seem quite reasonable...

High performance IPSec and SSL PCI network accelerator card with Cavium CN1010

ABC-130 - http://www.portwell.com/products/detail.asp?CUSTCHAR1=ABC-130

High performance IPSec and SSL PCI network accelerator card with Cavium CN1005

ABC-140 - http://www.portwell.com/products/detail.asp?CUSTCHAR1=ABC-140

High performance IPSec and SSL PCI-X network accelerator card with Cavium CN1010X

ABC-200 - http://www.portwell.com/products/detail.asp?CUSTCHAR1=ABC-200

[Ground Loop]

The problem is that much of the VPN/Crypto hardware is aimed at high bandwidth crypto, or high speed RSA calculations and the like.  "Heavy Lifting"

Our needs are much simpler.. we just want to run a lot of hashes.  Even IO bandwidth isn't all that important, since we know the entire set of input data to hash, and we're only interested in characteristics of the output, and not even the hash values need to be output at all.

You can run SHA-256 on a Xilinx Spartan 3A at about 7 Mbps per MHz, so 280MHz should crunch 2170 Gbps, and you should be able to run quite a few cores given our meager I/O requirements.