[ANN][BLC] Blakecoin Blake-256 for GPU/FPGA With Merged Mined Pools Stable Net

[teknohog]

@kramble I'm thinking of running my FPGAs without fan. I have a big heatsink on them, at which frequency would the theoretical heat be ok for long duration hashing without damaging the Spartan-6 chips?

At 172MHz they don't seem to produce that much heat...

Also you may find you can achieve a faster clock speed if you run the device cooler (silicon generally gives better performance at lower temperatures), so its up to you to decide the acceptable trade-off between perhaps a lower clock speed with no fan cooling, and a higher clock speed with a fan (and its associated noise).

I think the real question is why you'd want to run fanless, if a large and slow fan would be practically inaudible, and improve the speed considerably. Since you have a big heatsink, I assume you've also gotten rid of the tiny, whiny stock fans. (Why anyone would install them in the first place is beyond me - a single 80..120 mm fan would cover all 4 FPGAs quite ideally, keeping the high pressure center away from the heatsinks.)

I've built quiet computers with passive and nearly-passive cooling for about 10 years, starting with the same general idea: if I use a big-ass heatsink and a low-power chip, I should not need a fan. The reality is that passive cooling is rather quirky. Even the smallest forced airflow makes a huge difference. It can be hard to get a good natural convection even with chimney-style setups, because the healthy temperatures for chips are so low.

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[kramble]

I think the real question is why you'd want to run fanless, if a large and slow fan would be practically inaudible, and improve the speed considerably. Since you have a big heatsink, I assume you've also gotten rid of the tiny, whiny stock fans. (Why anyone would install them in the first place is beyond me - a single 80..120 mm fan would cover all 4 FPGAs quite ideally, keeping the high pressure center away from the heatsinks.)

Agreed. I used a single 120mm fan balanced centrally over the four individual heatsinks on the ztex and this worked perfectly well. The heatsinks ran at only 35C (for 20C ambient).

[jlsminingcorp]

I think the real question is why you'd want to run fanless, if a large and slow fan would be practically inaudible, and improve the speed considerably. Since you have a big heatsink, I assume you've also gotten rid of the tiny, whiny stock fans. (Why anyone would install them in the first place is beyond me - a single 80..120 mm fan would cover all 4 FPGAs quite ideally, keeping the high pressure center away from the heatsinks.)

Agreed. I used a single 120mm fan balanced centrally over the four individual heatsinks on the ztex and this worked perfectly well. The heatsinks ran at only 35C (for 20C ambient).

Did the same here. It doesn't have to be a hurricane to keep these things cool and 120mm fans fit nicely over the ztex boards.

[ShXnot]

hey guys,
ahh... i can't see the first page of this threat
is it just me or ...?

[boymok]

hey guys,
ahh... i can't see the first page of this threat
is it just me or ...?

it is just you.

[ShXnot]

hey guys,
ahh... i can't see the first page of this threat
is it just me or ...?

it is just you.

ok, thanks

[BlueDragon747]

kr105 has finished maintenance on www.blakecoinpool.org and looks like it is working great  

[bzyzny]

kr105 has finished maintenance on www.blakecoinpool.org and looks like it is working great  

thats great, we will need more pools to support the recent increase in miners

[BlueDragon747]

kr105 has finished maintenance on www.blakecoinpool.org and looks like it is working great  

thats great, we will need more pools to support the recent increase in miners

I will look into adding 2 more 

[MickGhee]

i just love blake!  i cant wait till the price matches its awesomeness DON'T SELL YET!

[knorrly]

[Slightly OT]
Have you heard of Maxcoin? It turns out to be a Blakecoin fork:
https://github.com/Max-Coin/maxcoin/commit/b235a14cf058c0ec766e3ac9bfdfa012e989c187
They replaced Blake with Keccak.

[BlueDragon747]

[Slightly OT]
Have you heard of Maxcoin? It turns out to be a Blakecoin fork:
https://github.com/Max-Coin/maxcoin/commit/b235a14cf058c0ec766e3ac9bfdfa012e989c187
They replaced Blake with Keccak.

Yeah I was informed by Luke but Keccak is not a good mining algo!

Blake will beat it on almost every platform  


Edit:
use the best hash for the job not blindly following NIST recommendations is the path Blakecoin has chosen  

Did following Recommendations help protect from the Dual_EC_DRBG problem due to a previous Recommendation from such standards organizations, nope Java and Android had to use a different random number generator when generating the public/private keys due to that weakness which was caused by large investment money by some agencies into pushing that standard.

Keccak and Scrypt are not bad algorithms in themselves its just they are not well suited for a mining algo    

[mogrith]

That's  Some Nice Agencies

[BlueDragon747]

That's  Some Nice Agencies

I am sure you can Google for the exact Agency or just read some news about Dual_EC_DRBG to see who was involved

Edit:
http://it.slashdot.org/story/14/01/01/1830238/dualecdrbg-backdoor-a-proof-of-concept

[BlueDragon747]

Blakecoin just got added to http://coinmarketcap.com 

[rupy]

The ztex are a bit awkward to judge the best clock speed as they seem to give hardware errors even during normal operation (probably a bug in the communication protocol, either in the driver or the FPGA code).

Yes, I tried setting them to 200MHz and they just stalled, producing only HW...

BTW, is the Blakecoin wallet running ok on a Raspberry Pi? I mean the chain should be small enough still to not hog all the cpu... Can we optimise the client for lightweight use or are we too lazy?

[BlueDragon747]

The ztex are a bit awkward to judge the best clock speed as they seem to give hardware errors even during normal operation (probably a bug in the communication protocol, either in the driver or the FPGA code).

Yes, I tried setting them to 200MHz and they just stalled, producing only HW...

BTW, is the Blakecoin wallet running ok on a Raspberry Pi? I mean the chain should be small enough still to not hog all the cpu... Can we optimise the client for lightweight use or are we too lazy?

Its been optimized with the Blake-256 algo so should be more cpu efficient on any platform, no plans for any special version for mainline client my Github is available you could always optimize/lightweight your own version then its just your own effort/motivation that will get results

[kramble]

Yes, I tried setting them to 200MHz and they just stalled, producing only HW...

YMMV, I only have a sample of 10 devices (2 in my lancelot, 4 each in Blue's Ztex 1.15y and CM1). The lancelot ran at 200MHz, but with HW errors, so I run it at 195MHz. The ztex (modded for higher core voltage) and CM1 devices were all between 204 and 220 MHz, but with some HW errors. Just be sure to use the latest bitstreams (see the github for links to dropbox) as the earlier ones were slower, though nothing new has actually been built for a couple of months now (I got fed up of the the Xilinx toolchain, just way too frustrating).

PS the ztex 1.15x build does appear to be slower than the 1.15y (it's quoted as 180MHz, error free), but that one is not my particular baby (hal7 did the work on the port, many thanks). Not sure if the speeds are like-for-like comparable as I tend to tolerate a higher HW error rate.

BTW, is the Blakecoin wallet running ok on a Raspberry Pi? I mean the chain should be small enough still to not hog all the cpu... Can we optimise the client for lightweight use or are we too lazy?

I run it on raspi and it works fine (even with both a cgminer and python miner running on the same device). The huge caveat is that the network stack locks up on a regular basis (roughly once a day) requiring a reboot (which I've automated). I don't know if this is hardware or software related (though swapping for a different raspi made no difference). I am still running the original debian wheezy distribution though (its just far too much trouble to update it).

PS One other caveat on raspi is that you may need to use the unsupported version of berlkeydb (libdb5.3++-dev) rather than the recommended version 4.8. This has the effect of making the wallet.dat incompatible with the windows/ubuntu builds. I tend to sweep funds into just a few addresses that I have paper backups for, just to be safe, but it will need care with change addresses when I need to spend some coin.

[rupy]

What about Transaction Malleability, can we fix that for BLC? Would be great advertisement!

[BlueDragon747]

What about Transaction Malleability, can we fix that for BLC? Would be great advertisement!

Bitcoin or at least a BIP for a solution you can create more issues than you solve atm the block chain is safe

This is really an exchange issue!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/11/mtgox_fallout_bogs_down_bitcoin_traders_as_malleability_issue_goes_mainstream/

this issue has been know about by the Bitcoin dev team for over a year and even has its own wiki  
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_Malleability