[Announcement] Avalon ASIC Development Status [Batch #1]

[irritant]

3. What gives you that impression? I'm a big fan of open source and as stated the whole openWRT image will be released and source code provided, if people want to run BFL/bASICs attached to Avalon devices they can do that too 

how many devices can the avalon host (usb ports?)?

[BitSyncom]

Why does everyone ask that when they know I can't reply

What do you mean? as in BFL has yet to inform you of this or you are not allow to say? little digging say they were suppose to do this Oct/Nov.

Simply that cgminer is open source so you are well able to fork it if required.
The comment about cgminer had been made long ago but neither of us have had contact from you about it so I just presumed you were wanting to support it yourself but thought I'd point out the obvious reasons for having devs with the hardware.

I guess I wasn't around when that happened, but don't take offense to it

how many devices can the avalon host (usb ports?)?

there's a usb port, so as many as your USB hub allow? I'm going to look up the actual limitations of the USB controller and get back to you.

[kano]

Why does everyone ask that when they know I can't reply

What do you mean? as in BFL has yet to inform you of this or you are not allow to say? little digging say they were suppose to do this Oct/Nov.

Just that BFL have usually been very secret and if I know something everyone else doesn't know, of course I'm not going to be the one to announce it ...

Simply that cgminer is open source so you are well able to fork it if required.
The comment about cgminer had been made long ago but neither of us have had contact from you about it so I just presumed you were wanting to support it yourself but thought I'd point out the obvious reasons for having devs with the hardware.

I guess I wasn't around when that happened, but don't take offense to it

None taken. That's why I posted. To find out.

[Bogart]

Why does everyone ask that when they know I can't reply

What do you mean? as in BFL has yet to inform you of this or you are not allow to say? little digging say they were suppose to do this Oct/Nov.

Just that BFL have usually been very secret and if I know something everyone else doesn't know, of course I'm not going to be the one to announce it

I hope you're not saying that when you come back from your tour.

[kano]

Why does everyone ask that when they know I can't reply

What do you mean? as in BFL has yet to inform you of this or you are not allow to say? little digging say they were suppose to do this Oct/Nov.

Just that BFL have usually been very secret and if I know something everyone else doesn't know, of course I'm not going to be the one to announce it

I hope you're not saying that when you come back from your tour.

Eh? Why on earth would that happen?

The point of it for BFL is to prove to yochdog and I that they have what they say they have and tell everyone.
Though of course it's not a forgone conclusion that my response will be positive, of course.

It wont happen, but to be blunt, if when I left, they said to not say anything ... of course that would be the first of many things I would say

[Inaba]

There will be no restrictions on what Kano and Yoch can report.

[crazyates]

There will be no restrictions on what Kano and Yoch can report.

I want to know how many doorknobs are located inside their office. I want to know how many steps it is from the farthest employee parking lot to the front door. How tall are the ceilings? How often are the paper towels in the bathroom refilled? Is it all the same color flooring throughout the entire building?

Answer me those, and then maybe I'll believe BFL is real.

[BitSyncom]

There will be no restrictions on what Kano and Yoch can report.

So when is this thing happening Josh?

[eldentyrell]

Hi, could you please post your die size so I can list your product's η-factor?  BFL has posted all the information needed to compute theirs.

[Unacceptable]

There will be no restrictions on what Kano and Yoch can report.

I want to know how many doorknobs are located inside their office. I want to know how many steps it is from the farthest employee parking lot to the front door. How tall are the ceilings? How often are the paper towels in the bathroom refilled? Is it all the same color flooring throughout the entire building?

Answer me those, and then maybe I'll believe BFL is real.

You Crazzzzzzy man 

[BitSyncom]

Hi, could you please post your die size so I can list your product's η-factor?  BFL has posted all the information needed to compute theirs.

3.88² mm

p.s.
while I understand your H/s/nm theory. The reality is you can't quiet measure things like that.

[eldentyrell]

Hi, could you please post your die size so I can list your product's η-factor?  BFL has posted all the information needed to compute theirs.

3.88² mm

And the other necessary piece of information: how many of these 15(mm²) chips are in your 66Gh/s product?

[kano]

Hi, could you please post your die size so I can list your product's η-factor?  BFL has posted all the information needed to compute theirs.

3.88² mm

And the other necessary piece of information: how many of these 15(mm²) chips are in your 66Gh/s product?

Only necessary for the manufacturer ...

[Phinnaeus Gage]

There will be no restrictions on what Kano and Yoch can report.

I want to know how many doorknobs are located inside their office. I want to know how many steps it is from the farthest employee parking lot to the front door. How tall are the ceilings? How often are the paper towels in the bathroom refilled? Is it all the same color flooring throughout the entire building?

Answer me those, and then maybe I'll believe BFL is real.

Full Disclosure: This account is not one of my sock puppets, albeit I like how he thinks. 

[hardcore-fs]

Why does everyone ask that when they know I can't reply

What do you mean? as in BFL has yet to inform you of this or you are not allow to say? little digging say they were suppose to do this Oct/Nov.

Simply that cgminer is open source so you are well able to fork it if required.
The comment about cgminer had been made long ago but neither of us have had contact from you about it so I just presumed you were wanting to support it yourself but thought I'd point out the obvious reasons for having devs with the hardware.

I guess I wasn't around when that happened, but don't take offense to it

how many devices can the avalon host (usb ports?)?

there's a usb port, so as many as your USB hub allow? I'm going to look up the actual limitations of the USB controller and get back to you.

Wrong!!!!... it has little to do with the controller and far more to do with the inherent protocols and what you will use them for.

Maximum chain for the USB is 127 devices.
BUT........
Since the USB spec is SINGLE point to point communication, the limiting factor is going to be the bandwidth of the USB MINUS connects/disconnects over the speed of the number of devices.

That is to say that EVEN with 250MB/s of bandwidth OR USB3 , the shear act of connection & disconnection per device is going to be the overall limiting factor. ESPECIALLY for small packets of data (nonce result/key).

Which is WHY the absolute best way to do this would be with TWO ethernet/WIFI ports.
You could use  IP address X.X.X.254 to broadcast a STREAM of jobs continually on one ethernet port.
Then use the second Ethernet port to return results to the controller (smaller bandwidth with buffered results).
Absolutely NO need to connect/disconnect the work communication channel.

HUB the first ethernet connection. (an ETHERNET hub duplicates the same data packets on ALL connection without intervention, very high speed ESP. for a single stream.)
SWITCH the second ethernet connection.(more intelligent but induces slight switching delay)
As the secondary channel reported completion, then the primary communication channel would modify the stream to add new jobs & remove old ones.

Since it is a stream, it can scale well over multiple hubs....... USB will get buried at an exponential rate due to the speed of the ASIC clients need for WORK.


HC

[crazyates]

There will be no restrictions on what Kano and Yoch can report.

I want to know how many doorknobs are located inside their office. I want to know how many steps it is from the farthest employee parking lot to the front door. How tall are the ceilings? How often are the paper towels in the bathroom refilled? Is it all the same color flooring throughout the entire building?

Answer me those, and then maybe I'll believe BFL is real.

Full Disclosure: This account is not one of my sock puppets, albeit I like how he thinks. 

I'm not?

[2112]

HUB the first ethernet connection. (an ETHERNET hub duplicates the same data packets on ALL connection without intervention, very high speed ESP. for a single stream.)
SWITCH the second ethernet connection.(more intelligent but induces slight switching delay)

Actually if you measure the packet loss statistic you'll find that using only hubs (or even just one hub) will give you best results. Run-of-the-mill Ethernet switches have unfortunately quite bad error probabilities.

Even the top-of-the-line Ethernet switches with 802.3x and 802.1p are just about equaling error rates of a cheap fixed-speed 10BaseT or 100BaseTX hubs with all cards correctly supporting the collision detection/exponential backoff/retry.

[kano]

Meanwhile on my not very expensive D-Link DGS-1008D GBit switch my desktop is connected to:

http://media.gdgt.com/img/product/12/9ry/dgs-1008d-oqx-460.jpg

p9p1: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        inet xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx  netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast xxx.xxx.xxx.255
        inet6 xxxx::xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx  prefixlen 64  scopeid 0x20<link>
        ether xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
        RX packets 62921947  bytes 33087058738 (30.8 GiB)
        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 63627380  bytes 48378527420 (45.0 GiB)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

16:10:52 up 4 days,  2:51, 33 users,  load average: 1.36, 1.43, 1.48

Yep I prefer switches ...

[hardcore-fs]

HUB the first ethernet connection. (an ETHERNET hub duplicates the same data packets on ALL connection without intervention, very high speed ESP. for a single stream.)
SWITCH the second ethernet connection.(more intelligent but induces slight switching delay)

Actually if you measure the packet loss statistic you'll find that using only hubs (or even just one hub) will give you best results. Run-of-the-mill Ethernet switches have unfortunately quite bad error probabilities.

Even the top-of-the-line Ethernet switches with 802.3x and 802.1p are just about equaling error rates of a cheap fixed-speed 10BaseT or 100BaseTX hubs with all cards correctly supporting the collision detection/exponential backoff/retry.

Then there is something very very wrong with your network or switch source (HuaWei?)...........

A hub sends packets to EVERY connection, making it ideal for single channel network mass communication, but fairly shite for anything else, because like USB, ethernet can only have one conversation on the wire at a time.
So if every connection is shouting to the hub, then the hub is backing off ALL the connections whilst it duplicates ALL the damned packets, to EACH connection.


 (which rules out your point Two above as well), since if you route ALL the traffic (IN/OUT) via 1  hub, then the returning hashes from the miners will prevent work being distributed and disrupt your stream.......

A switch is far more elegant, it knows the source/destination and so produces an exponential REDUCTION of traffic based on the number of connections VRS a hub.

[2112]

Then there is something very very wrong with your network or switch source (HuaWei?)...........

A hub sends packets to EVERY connection, making it ideal for single channel network mass communication, but fairly shite for anything else, because like USB, ethernet can only have one conversation on the wire at a time.
So if every connection is shouting to the hub, then the hub is backing off ALL the connections whilst it duplicates ALL the damned packets, to EACH connection.


 (which rules out your point Two above as well), since if you route ALL the traffic (IN/OUT) via 1  hub, then the returning hashes from the miners will prevent work being distributed and disrupt your stream.......

A switch is far more elegant, it knows the source/destination and so produces an exponential REDUCTION of traffic based on the number of connections VRS a hub.

I can't really fault your theoretical analysis. What you wrote is quite right, especially about the benefit of multicasting. But I really doubt that you've actually run such configuration for any significant period of time.

I actually have production experience with multiple clusters in multiple physical/organizational locations with quite similar properties to the ones you've described: about 50/50 mixture of multicast/unicast packets, traffic non-peaky but near-uniform, short packets.

It is our observation that to achieve effective 0% packet loss we needed to specify either Cisco Catalyst (or similar class) switches or
(quite strangely) old Allied Telesyn/NetGear ProSafe/Intel InBusiness/etc. fixed-speed (or managed) hubs. The popular unmanaged office switches like NetGear/D-Link/Cisco Linksys were all showing anywere from serval through several tens to hundred-something occurences of packet corruption/loss per day. The steady-state packet rate is 50Hz-100Hz (or pps).

Our conjecture about those rare but steady failures is that this is somehow related to how the small/cheap switches pass as FCC Class B. To get home-office rating vendors use spread spectrum clocking, which is in effect an intentional jitter. So in order to get best performance use either FCC Class A data-center grade devices or cheap obsolete hubs that passed FCC Class B because they work under CSMA/CD principle.

Oh, and an additional free piece of advice who want to build cheap multicast clusters with hubs: test whether your network adapters actually do support half-duplex. Quite a number of devices claim to support half-duplex but actually don't and need upgraded firmware or simply a replacement. Various versions of popular LNE100TX & KNE100TX are common culprits; but there are so many variants of them that you'll really need exact part numbers. Some versions of Intel PRO/100+ line drivers for Windows don't correctly work with half-duplex.