Mining on Supercomputers

[miner4766]

Hi,
I have a friend named John Doe and he claims that he has unlimited and hopefully unsupervised access to a supercomputer that is one of the top 500 in the world for a day. Now John here was wondering if it would be plausible to use such a device for mining online currencies. Hypothetically since there will be no running cost for john how much profit could he make and which currency or method he should use? Also John has an advanced understanding of math and electrical circuits but he has never mined before.
Edit: John told me to mention the device that is spoken of is capable of maxing around 6k flops.

[-ck]

Computers are hopeless at bitcoin mining, no matter how powerful they are, compared to a dedicated piece of ASIC mining gear. There is a good chance the supercomputer you speak of is about 100 times slower than the average current generation piece of mining hardware worth less than $1000 and uses 100 times as much power.

[miner4766]

Computers are hopeless at bitcoin mining, no matter how powerful they are, compared to a dedicated piece of ASIC mining gear. There is a good chance the supercomputer you speak of is about 100 times slower than the average current generation piece of mining hardware worth less than $1000 and uses 100 times as much power.

Thank you, but John doesn't necessarily want to mine bitcoin any profitable decentralized cryptocurrency is fine by him. John knows that using the CPU heavily for mining is now unprofitable but since he will not be paying for the electricity costs he wonders what will happen if he mined a currency that favors CPU mining.

[-ck]

I'll help you by moving you to somewhere else then since you asked about bitcoin mining in your topic and you're in the bitcoin mining section of the bitcoin talk forum I figured you were asking about bitcoin but now you're asking about something else.

[arielbit]

Try monero..i think cpu mining has a chance there, specially a supercomputer

[miner4766]

Try monero..i think cpu mining has a chance there, specially a supercomputer

Okay thanks. Do you by any chance, vaguely know how much Monero coin or USD will it generate in 24 hours?

[mewhoyou]

Hi,
I have a friend named John Doe and he claims that he has unlimited and hopefully unsupervised access to a supercomputer that is one of the top 500 in the world for a day. Now John here was wondering if it would be plausible to use such a device for mining online currencies. Hypothetically since there will be no running cost for john how much profit could he make and which currency or method he should use? Also John has an advanced understanding of math and electrical circuits but he has never mined before.
Edit: John told me to mention the device that is spoken of is capable of maxing around 6k flops.

PennyWisePountFOOLISH ...

tell him to drop the idea if he value his WORK!!!!

[ps_jb]

Anyways, your friend should re-write the mining code to work in multiple parallel flows to be used on supercomputers

Which is not trivial at all

[Za1n]

I wouldn't place too much faith in the "unsupervised access" part of your story, even if you think you are the administrator. "John" could just as well be trying to run some computations for an enemy state or some other nefarious purpose which I am sure the owner would be very interested in keeping tabs on and preventing. Don't be so cock sure of yourself that you end up in prison for trying to skim a few bucks.

[digaran]

Hi,
I have a friend named John Doe and he claims that he has unlimited and hopefully unsupervised access to a supercomputer that is one of the top 500 in the world for a day. Now John here was wondering if it would be plausible to use such a device for mining online currencies. Hypothetically since there will be no running cost for john how much profit could he make and which currency or method he should use? Also John has an advanced understanding of math and electrical circuits but he has never mined before.
Edit: John told me to mention the device that is spoken of is capable of maxing around 6k flops.

There is no 24 hours quick cash grab in mining at all, to my knowledge when you deploy 1B supercomputers at the same time for any altcoin the difficulty increases in a way to make it impossible to mine a lot in a short time period.
At least bitcoin mining works this way and that is why it will take 80 more years or so to mine all 21M bitcoins.

[arielbit]

Try monero..i think cpu mining has a chance there, specially a supercomputer

Okay thanks. Do you by any chance, vaguely know how much Monero coin or USD will it generate in 24 hours?

i don't know the capability of your supercomputer when it hashes the cryptonight algorithm since i didn't mine monero with my cpu, but from what i've read back then cpu can do better at monero compared to zcash and ethereum.

The only way to know is to test it...even vaguely know how much is still too vague for me to make even a rough estimate LOL.

You can also google monero mining calculator..find how much an i7 cpu hashes and then multiply its hash/income in relation to the supercomputer hash rate...by doing that you can now have an estimated income

[Tmdz]

Let me take a hack at this, this is pretty cool thing to think about.

So a super computer is really nothing more than a large farm of cpus with a specialized OS that interconnects it so the system will act as one giant super computer.  I poked around a bit and find these specs for a super computer in switzerland https://www.top500.org/lists/2016/06/ and it has Xeon E5-2670 total of 14,500 cpu's.  Zcash will probably be one of the better coins to mine for cpu or monero but lets look at Zcash.

14'500 cpu X 50 sol/s = 725,000 sol/s

that comes out to about 81 coins per day or ~$4'000

On monero

I used this as a reference https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/t_usoLpWsHq7K6-PeYXigCw/htmlview#   there is similar chip in there that I presume is rated as a dual cpu system so that is 400 h/s per cpu.

14'500 X 400 = 5,800,000

That is about $7'700 a day but will be less once difficulty adjusts.

Now the hard part will be getting a dev that know HOW to write a program on that specialized OS and works.  Miner devs do not come cheap, and something as specialized as that may be well above anyones skill level or simply not worth the price.  Also they will access to the super computer to get it working in the first place which makes a pretty big security issue.

[buwaytress]

What John Doe is suggesting is unquestionably unethical - supercomputers and a top 500 one at that are built for very specific purposes and all its CPU resources would already be put to full use. Any external use, such as CPU mining as suggested, would clearly be a conflict of interest.

It's just a roundabout way of saying John Doe would like to steal resources to get some coin.

[mirny]

Guys, please don't feed this troll!!!

[64dimensions]

Actually, I would consider a multi GPU farm as some sort of super computer.

I believe the typical high end GPU does around 2.5 tera FLOPS.

UC Berkeley actually has an effort which solicits PCs and higher to do distributed computation using what we would consider to be a multi GPU PC using their own ""mining"" software.

The effort is called BOINC and supplies computational horsepower to universities and startups to work on protein folding, black holes etc etc.

[Altcoining]

Actually, I would consider a multi GPU farm as some sort of super computer.

I believe the typical high end GPU does around 2.5 tera FLOPS.

UC Berkeley actually has an effort which solicits PCs and higher to do distributed computation using what we would consider to be a multi GPU PC using their own ""mining"" software.

The effort is called BOINC and supplies computational horsepower to universities and startups to work on protein folding, black holes etc etc.

Typical at 2.5? More like 4-6 honestly, The RX 480 Nitro at 1342 gets 5.5TFlops/s here. The MSI's get around 5.3.

[miner4766]

John thanks you all for your quick replies and apologies for his lack of one. After talking to one of his buddies which has whom has doctorate in Informatics and reading the comments, He has decided that it would be too much of an hassle and he will be risking a lot for small gain.