[ANN][YAC] Yacminer GPU miner for Yacoin

[mikaelh]

This is a modified version of cgminer that supports mining Yacoins. This release includes my latest OpenCL scrypt-chacha kernel (v7) and a fix for share difficulty calculation. No more spam about blocks being found all the time.

Original version by hanzac
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=232241.0

Changes:
 - Faster OpenCL kernel
 - Fixed share difficulty calculation
 - Rebased off of cgminer 3.3.1

Changes in -yac2:
 - Fixed network errors caused by too many sockets when pool supports long polling

Usage:
Good sample settings for a 7790 (with N = 2048):

Code:

yacminer --scrypt -w 128 --lookup-gap 2 -I 17 --thread-concurrency 8000 -g 1 -o http://mining.pool.net:8706 -u username -p password

Parameters work similarly as in normal scrypt mining except that more memory is needed depending on the N parameter currently used by the network. Try to find a maximal value for thread concurrency. Set worksize (-w) to 256 for HD 7000 series and 64 for older cards. Experiment with different values for lookup gap if you have your card has lots of cores. Increase intensity until you start seeing HW errors.

More settings have also been posted in the old thread.

Downloads

Windows x64 version
https://mega.co.nz/#!B10C3TZT!M6ZLMwG-QHKSJxVPMnWHb2A171la6qFpsOuNfSrhGyI
http://download.muuttuja.org/yacoin/yacminer/3.3.1-yac2/yacminer-3.3.1-yac2-windows-x64.zip

Windows x86 version
https://mega.co.nz/#!twsQwbaB!X8zL0wqsfGeO-ujuFZx62D6PmHY4D9HT82-qJ0McYME
http://download.muuttuja.org/yacoin/yacminer/3.3.1-yac2/yacminer-3.3.1-yac2-windows-x86.zip

Source code (.tar.xz)
https://mega.co.nz/#!Ip9CVICS!UJ7dRj9qdV2aAVtcEWFgj06YIlEWHgOMg0g0F1R2IWM
http://download.muuttuja.org/yacoin/yacminer/3.3.1-yac2/yacminer-3.3.1-yac2.tar.xz

Source code (.tar.bz2)
https://mega.co.nz/#!p8VhxLRS!V-xBLn_IJgMh1RlZZWYppRrjhbh6ax1Wbzlljnba6Nw
http://download.muuttuja.org/yacoin/yacminer/3.3.1-yac2/yacminer-3.3.1-yac2.tar.bz2

Linux compilation

Code:

wget http://download.muuttuja.org/yacoin/yacminer/3.3.1-yac2/yacminer-3.3.1-yac2.tar.xz
tar xJvf yacminer-3.3.1-yac2.tar.xz
cd yacminer-3.3.1-yac2
CFLAGS="-march=native -O2 -pipe" ./configure --enable-scrypt
make

[1714923781]

1714923781

[Charles999]

You da man!

[rbdrbd]

Thank you, trying it out now.

[3dcgminer]

Thank you, any chance of getting a version that supports ybcoin too?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=243046.0
https://github.com/ybcoin/ybcoin

[mikaelh]

Thank you, any chance of getting a version that supports ybcoin too?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=243046.0
https://github.com/ybcoin/ybcoin

I have no interest in Ybcoin since it's simply a clone of Yacoin for the Chinese market. Looks like the only thing one would have to change is the calculation of the Nfactor. No doubt someone has already figured that out and is happily mining at 10 Mh/s. Someone else can release a miner for Ybcoin if they want.

[azwccc]

Links for x86 and x64 versions from mega are the same?

[amytheplanarshift]

Thanks for working on this!

[mikaelh]

Links for x86 and x64 versions from mega are the same?

Oops, fixed. Thanks for pointing it out!

[tomtommy]

+1

Thank You.

[Moray]

Hm-m, this one is even faster than previous?!? Great work, thank's for sharing!

[forsetifox]

Thanks Mike. That block spam is hella annoying.

[eule]

This is amazing, getting 84 kH/s with my good old 5770, these are my settings (not sure if best):
yacminer.exe --scrypt -w 64 -I 18  --lookup-gap 2 --thread-concurrency 5120 -g 1 -o http://yacpool.tk:8838 -u Y9JG2HQNMEc3N8nfPdJzT51xwKoQSzZSBJ -p x

[Eli0t]

"No more spam about blocks being found all the time."

very nice 

[djkakadu]

With this settings i have a 123kh/s on 7790.
Amazing !   

[azwccc]

Thank you, any chance of getting a version that supports ybcoin too?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=243046.0
https://github.com/ybcoin/ybcoin

I have no interest in Ybcoin since it's simply a clone of Yacoin for the Chinese market. Looks like the only thing one would have to change is the calculation of the Nfactor. No doubt someone has already figured that out and is happily mining at 10 Mh/s. Someone else can release a miner for Ybcoin if they want.

Hi Mike, I am new to the code. Is the script.c or script-chacha.cl I need to modify?
Thanks,

[Mapuo]

I have only 111 kh/s with my 7850

[paulthetafy]

Hey mikaelh, are you looking into the ways around keeping GPU's usable after the Aug N++?  Or is that something hanzac might be doing?  Or neither?

[mikaelh]

Hey mikaelh, are you looking into the ways around keeping GPU's usable after the Aug N++?  Or is that something hanzac might be doing?  Or neither?

Well, let's re-iterate this once more. GPU mining is not going to magically stop at N = 8192. My miner should survive it just fine. I'm not going to benchmark it because people always keep finding new settings after N changes. Some people will use a higher lookup gap and others will find ways to use lower values. I might come up with some new tricks but at the moment I'm pretty happy how the code scales with the lookup gap.

[paulthetafy]

Hey mikaelh, are you looking into the ways around keeping GPU's usable after the Aug N++?  Or is that something hanzac might be doing?  Or neither?

Well, let's re-iterate this once more. GPU mining is not going to magically stop at N = 8192. My miner should survive it just fine. I'm not going to benchmark it because people always keep finding new settings after N changes. Some people will use a higher lookup gap and others will find ways to use lower values. I might come up with some new tricks but at the moment I'm pretty happy how the code scales with the lookup gap.

My apologies, I thought I understood the way it works but obviously not.  I thought that the RAM on the GPU was the limitation and this couldn't be overcome.  I'm not sure I understand the lookup gap / TC correlation and the use of GPU RAM vs system RAM.

[mikaelh]

Hey mikaelh, are you looking into the ways around keeping GPU's usable after the Aug N++?  Or is that something hanzac might be doing?  Or neither?

Well, let's re-iterate this once more. GPU mining is not going to magically stop at N = 8192. My miner should survive it just fine. I'm not going to benchmark it because people always keep finding new settings after N changes. Some people will use a higher lookup gap and others will find ways to use lower values. I might come up with some new tricks but at the moment I'm pretty happy how the code scales with the lookup gap.

My apologies, I thought I understood the way it works but obviously not.  I thought that the RAM on the GPU was the limitation and this couldn't be overcome.  I'm not sure I understand the lookup gap / TC correlation and the use of GPU RAM vs system RAM.

It's pretty hard to discuss the details of lookup gap without explaining the entire scrypt algorithm first. I did write a bit about lookup gap on the other forum:
http://yacointalk.com/index.php/topic,350.msg1511.html#msg1511

The miner allocates the scratchpad from GPU memory. You may need enough system RAM to support that, but that's a driver issue.