LITECOIN -- GPU Mining

[ShadowAlexey]

First of all we need open sourced miner, so we could see the algorithm which they used to achive such performance, after all we could mine using nvidia cards,this would lead us to 2 different markets,using 2 different gpu, question is,what will be the performance.

[moocow1452]

This might be a good thing if those of us with NVidia cards lying around could be on par with a uber-CPU setup without being a sellout to Radeon Farms. My Core 2 Duo gets about 6khash while I'm using and can go up to 11 when the stars are right, while I have a GT335m that could totally pull some decent weight. Course, if NVidia is viable, that might make Amazon Mining a feasible reality, and then who knows what will happen?

[tatsuchan]

This might be a good thing if those of us with NVidia cards lying around could be on par with a uber-CPU setup without being a sellout to Radeon Farms. My Core 2 Duo gets about 6khash while I'm using and can go up to 11 when the stars are right, while I have a GT335m that could totally pull some decent weight. Course, if NVidia is viable, that might make Amazon Mining a feasible reality, and then who knows what will happen?

I'm really curious to see what can be done. If someone really spends some quality time on this I'm sure we'll see a lot of change in the Litecoin value.  Ups and downs like we haven't seen. It is a great test to see how well supported Litecoin will be.

[ShadowAlexey]

Problem is, there is no skilled openCL programmer willing to do this development in open source way.

[ThiagoCMC]

This might be a good thing if those of us with NVidia cards lying around could be on par with a uber-CPU setup without being a sellout to Radeon Farms. My Core 2 Duo gets about 6khash while I'm using and can go up to 11 when the stars are right, while I have a GT335m that could totally pull some decent weight. Course, if NVidia is viable, that might make Amazon Mining a feasible reality, and then who knows what will happen?

Seems that no one wants to try it... 

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=55038.msg656798#msg656798

[marked]

I like Litecoin and want it to prosper too.  I think it's future if it become more profitable may be in very low power ARM CPU farms if it can be kept more efficient on CPU than GPU.  Like the £25 RaspberryPi at 5W if it can get >5kH/s? for 5W with good well tuned mining software.  

raw hashing speed on an rPI, this should be halved for bitcoin mining; no idea how it translates to litecoin.

still trying to find whether it is an alpha or beta board that the test was run on.

EDIT: oops, missed the URL - http://elinux.org/RPi_Performance

Code:

OpenSSL 0.9.8o 01 Jun 2010
built on: Thu Aug 26 18:56:26 UTC 2010
options:bn(64,32) md2(int) rc4(ptr,int) des(idx,risc1,4,long) aes(partial) blowfish(idx)
compiler: gcc -fPIC -DOPENSSL_PIC -DZLIB -DOPENSSL_THREADS -D_REENTRANT -DDSO_DLFCN -DHAVE_DLFCN_H -DL_ENDIAN -DTERMIO -O2 -Wa,--noexecstack -g -Wall
available timing options: TIMES TIMEB HZ=100 [sysconf value]
timing function used: times
The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed.
type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes
...
sha1               303.72k     1092.39k     3106.50k     6302.57k     9852.39k
...
sha256             679.98k     1629.47k     2905.43k     3708.32k     4175.45k
sha512              41.02k      163.83k      232.63k      318.20k      353.81k

marked

[ThiagoCMC]

Maybe the future can be something like that:

* Bitcoin Mining moves to FPGA/ASIC;
* GPU Mining moves to Litecoin;
* Litecoin CPU mining dies...

Can be?!

[markm]

Can GeistGeld and so on also be GPU mined?

Can they be merged mined with Litecoins?

-MarkM-

[DannyM]

Can GeistGeld and so on also be GPU mined?

Can they be merged mined with Litecoins?

-MarkM-

Geistgeld uses the same algorithm as bitcoin and can be GPU mined with standard bitcoin gpu mining software.

For this same reason, geistgeld cannot be merged mined with litecoin.

[markm]

Oh I thought it was one of the CPU ones. Well then I meant the others, I cant even remember their names, wasn't one of them by the same guy who did GiestGeld? That is probably how I thought it was one of them.

-MarkM-

[DannyM]

Yes, lolcust who started geistgeld started the CPU friendly "tenebrix", from which "fairbrix" and "litecoin" were derived.

I could be wrong, but it looks like similar straight-forward and simple, yet breaking/forking changes as were done for namecoin, etc. would enable the CPU-based chains to be merged-mined. Coordinating changes for these chains could be seen as difficult because of their low profile, or perhaps it could be seen as simple because the low interest level allows you to overpower the chain with your fork.

[ShadowAlexey]

You shouldnt forget that main thoughts of any p2p currency is that everyone is equal,and everyone can start,so when btc will go to asic it will be very easy to shut it down,all you have to do is to close the fabric.
But it is interesting to think of gpu in cpu because it should have access to cpu cache which means, it will have very high speed and low latency memory.
But all we need right now is skilled openCL developer, who is ready to do some job and share it with the community.
Couse at the moment I dont get how they are getting the performance they do.

[ThiagoCMC]

Close the ASIC factory?! Are you serious

[ShadowAlexey]

Close the ASIC factory?! Are you serious

There are many reasons why factory could be close,when we are talking about ecurrency,when it stops to be profitable\los of interest.Then what?
where are you going to get hardware to support system when existent hardware will get broken? Open new factory costs money.

[01BTC10]

On the SC wiki page, the Reaper Linux X64 link is broken.

I downloaded source but didn't find instruction for compilation.

Anyone know the procedure?

[film2240]

I'm getting my laptop to mine LTC while mining BTC on my other PC (The one with the decent GPU in it) so that I can ensure that I can at least profit in 1 way or another (by diversifying my e-curency portfolio).I tried reaper gpu miner but it's always stuck on 'compiling kernel..this could take up to 2 minutes'. Any ideas why? I can CPU mine LTC on the laptop,just not GPU as well.Oh well.Are there other GPU miners for LTC?

[smoothie]

I'm getting my laptop to mine LTC while mining BTC on my other PC (The one with the decent GPU in it) so that I can ensure that I can at least profit in 1 way or another (by diversifying my e-curency portfolio).I tried reaper gpu miner but it's always stuck on 'compiling kernel..this could take up to 2 minutes'. Any ideas why? I can CPU mine LTC on the laptop,just not GPU as well.Oh well.Are there other GPU miners for LTC?

Seems like Reaper could be optimized more and possibly made more user friendly.

Once this is done or another GPU mining setup for litecoin comes along is when the network has rate will grow much much larger. Until then this will be a bottleneck for some entering the market/network.

[film2240]

I'm getting my laptop to mine LTC while mining BTC on my other PC (The one with the decent GPU in it) so that I can ensure that I can at least profit in 1 way or another (by diversifying my e-curency portfolio).I tried reaper gpu miner but it's always stuck on 'compiling kernel..this could take up to 2 minutes'. Any ideas why? I can CPU mine LTC on the laptop,just not GPU as well.Oh well.Are there other GPU miners for LTC?

Seems like Reaper could be optimized more and possibly made more user friendly.

Once this is done or another GPU mining setup for litecoin comes along is when the network has rate will grow much much larger. Until then this will be a bottleneck for some entering the market/network.

Yeah,tell me about it.It seems odd for those who struggle as they'll miss out (for a while then they'll be on par eventually) but can be very rewarding for those who are able to get their heads around it.Anyhow,are there other miners or is reaper my only choice for LTC mining? I tested out the latest beta.It doesn't work,it just shows a bunch of lines then quits again.Maybe I should try it on my PC (as it has the 'right' kinda GPU for it to run) when I get the chance.

[smoothie]

I'm getting my laptop to mine LTC while mining BTC on my other PC (The one with the decent GPU in it) so that I can ensure that I can at least profit in 1 way or another (by diversifying my e-curency portfolio).I tried reaper gpu miner but it's always stuck on 'compiling kernel..this could take up to 2 minutes'. Any ideas why? I can CPU mine LTC on the laptop,just not GPU as well.Oh well.Are there other GPU miners for LTC?

Seems like Reaper could be optimized more and possibly made more user friendly.

Once this is done or another GPU mining setup for litecoin comes along is when the network has rate will grow much much larger. Until then this will be a bottleneck for some entering the market/network.

Yeah,tell me about it.It seems odd for those who struggle as they'll miss out (for a while then they'll be on par eventually) but can be very rewarding for those who are able to get their heads around it.Anyhow,are there other miners or is reaper my only choice for LTC mining? I tested out the latest beta.It doesn't work,it just shows a bunch of lines then quits again.Maybe I should try it on my PC (as it has the 'right' kinda GPU for it to run) when I get the chance.

To my knowledge Reaper is the only publicly available litecoin GPU mining software. There maybe others that people haven't released yet, but thats just speculation.

[crazy_rabbit]

Prior to the recent insane jump in value of LTC on the market and the following incredible ramp up in difficulty, it has occurred to me that perhaps we need to think again about the idea of making Litecoin GPU resistant.

At the moment the incredible jump in value of LTC is in a purely speculative capacity, and the resulting number of miners with GPU's getting involved, threatens to destroy long-term "ownership" in the Coin as it will be come far more difficult to mine much faster then the user base expands.

At the moment, to be honest, LTC is in its infancy- there is virtually no infrastructure developed yet to enable true commerce using LTC, yet it's value is attracting so much hash power that it's fast becoming worthless to CPU mine- regardless of the fact that GPU mining on BTC is an order of magnitude greater, it can still be enough to make mining with a CPU impossible.

The reason why modifying the script to be GPU resistant would be important is that it is much easier to acquire substantial GPU hash power then it is to acquire CPU power (with the exception of bot-nets). Your average, even top end computer, will generally have max. 1 cpu chip (with multiple cores). While the same average computer can house many GPU cards. The barrier to multiplying ones CPU power vis-a-vis requiring a complete system to run a CPU is much higher then multiplying ones GPU power. With GPU'S  enterprising individuals can concentrate hashing power significantly and quite quickly.

It is my opinion that for LTC to serve as a functional alternative to BTC (and have a future as a functional currency in any capacity) it is important that vast numbers of individuals are able to contribute and participate meaningfully in the process of mining. While of course the answer that most people will first arrive at is 'the increase in power helps to secure the network against attacks' I believe there is a real danger that while securing the network against attacks we may be simultaneously walling LTC off from widespread adoption, and thus it's long term potential and usefulness as a currency.