Mining server room (cooling development help)

[Gameover]

We have a source for complete single slot pcie machines in the amount of 50 machines a skid at a cost of 20 each then add 133 plus tax only on 133 of 5% for the gpu add psu that powers the gpu and board sufficiently for 30 that's 9600 just for the machines that's cheaper by far then what 90% of you even pay for a 5870

See bobR it's not who you know but who knows you ! That's how you get good deals buy in volume with a corporate account

Don't under estimate the cost and moving factor of volume purchases of end of life hardware

Given the way you structured your sentence and your hardware logic, i can only say its not the best idea in the universe, really. Triple slot am3 with 5850s are your best bet if you want to expand massively. your single slot shitpcs have no resale value and will really put a hurting on your administrative overhead with that amount of cards.

Oh and surprisingly I have sold all the legit cd keys for xp pro already for double the cost of the pc itself 

But I do get your concerns you are right and English isn't my first language so I'm sorry I know I carry no grammer

he has a point though, given that the difficulty is going well over a million in 20 days, it is quickly going to become all about efficiency, and having 1 card per cpu is a drawback, just as cpu mining isn't worth it, next will be nvidia gpus.  how much is each system w/o the vid card going to use?

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[smooth]

it is quickly going to become all about efficiency

Efficiency is subjective

[warweed]

I don't disagree that running single gpus per mobo is more power consuming but the proc is hardly used and the hdd won't be spinning constant so the actual benefit ia minimal just like if I were to run my psu's on 240 instead of 120 but yeah I get what your saying when we generate some more profit we may consider switching up hardware and power and use the singles as backups and translationing boards while funding bigger setups who knows this is a fly by the seat of our pants operation lol

[w128]

We have a source for complete single slot pcie machines in the amount of 50 machines a skid at a cost of 20 each then add 133 plus tax only on 133 of 5% for the gpu add psu that powers the gpu and board sufficiently for 30 that's 9600 just for the machines that's cheaper by far then what 90% of you even pay for a 5870

See bobR it's not who you know but who knows you ! That's how you get good deals buy in volume with a corporate account

Don't under estimate the cost and moving factor of volume purchases of end of life hardware

Given the way you structured your sentence and your hardware logic, i can only say its not the best idea in the universe, really. Triple slot am3 with 5850s are your best bet if you want to expand massively. your single slot shitpcs have no resale value and will really put a hurting on your administrative overhead with that amount of cards.

Oh and surprisingly I have sold all the legit cd keys for xp pro already for double the cost of the pc itself  

But I do get your concerns you are right and English isn't my first language so I'm sorry I know I carry no grammer

he has a point though, given that the difficulty is going well over a million in 20 days, it is quickly going to become all about efficiency, and having 1 card per cpu is a drawback, just as cpu mining isn't worth it, next will be nvidia gpus.  how much is each system w/o the vid card going to use?

I imagine losses in efficiency are effectively offset by the fact that the PCs cost $20. Considering a minimal system sans GPU is going to consume <100W in any case and PCs old enough to going for $20 aren't going to particularly power hungry.

Someone building from scratch with new equipment is looking at a lot more than $20 for their CPU, RAM, PSU and 3-slot mobos, probably $100 or more per node. That's a difference of $4000 across 50 machines. Those 50 inefficient machines will probably eat no more than an extra $300-400 per month in power over a 3-slot build. We can hardly predict what the bitcoin world will look in 6+ months when the two would converge.

Someone could point to the potential resale of newer gear at that point but, I think they'd actually be mistaken. You'll have an easier time moving or possibly donating semi-complete systems than selling a pile of low-end, outdated parts.

[warweed]

Not to worrie about resale as I previously stated when to cost to mine out weights the benefits of mining we will be using the gpu "cluster" persay to work on some other projects and lease it out to researchers I'm sure there are alot of people that would love cheap access to that much power

Who knows lol I sure don't will play it by ear

[allinvain]

I don't disagree that running single gpus per mobo is more power consuming but the proc is hardly used and the hdd won't be spinning constant so the actual benefit ia minimal just like if I were to run my psu's on 240 instead of 120 but yeah I get what your saying when we generate some more profit we may consider switching up hardware and power and use the singles as backups and translationing boards while funding bigger setups who knows this is a fly by the seat of our pants operation lol

Don't use a HD at all. Use a bootable USB stick with LinuxCoin on it. Also running linux ensures that you won't have that nasty 100% cpu usage issue windows miners have.

For PSU I'd try to find 80 Plus Gold rated PSUs if you're concerned about power efficiency - which you should. You'd save 10 to 20 percent per machine in otherwise wasted energy.

Yep, fly by the seat of your pants operations are more fun Hey if you can have fun while doing it and make some BTC why not do it

[allinvain]

Not to worrie about resale as I previously stated when to cost to mine out weights the benefits of mining we will be using the gpu "cluster" persay to work on some other projects and lease it out to researchers I'm sure there are alot of people that would love cheap access to that much power

Who knows lol I sure don't will play it by ear

You live somewhere in Alberta right? Lease the computational power to the University of Calgary or some other western university.

[w128]

Not to worrie about resale as I previously stated when to cost to mine out weights the benefits of mining we will be using the gpu "cluster" persay to work on some other projects and lease it out to researchers I'm sure there are alot of people that would love cheap access to that much power

Who knows lol I sure don't will play it by ear

I don't know about that.

You've got a couple of things to overcome:

1) There are already brokers for general purpose cloud-compute capacity but, nothing for GPGPU yet as far as I know.

2) Scientific computing tends toward Nvidia. Nvidia has been working on making itself a player in that area for several years while AMD is just started. People with CUDA code aren't going to have any interest in your cluster.

I expect that #1 will be resolved before long if it isn't underway already. Once that happens, #2 will disappear too.

It would be very interesting to see bitcoin miners end up as next-generation cloud providers.

[warweed]

Yeah Edmonton and I was thinking about u of a researchers not having the actual numbers what do you figure the power usage would be say of single machine running a hdd then say a thumb drive ? And I Haven't used Linux coin yet but is it fairly easy to overclock in ? ? I would need to find a cheap source of a bunch of thumb drives in order to do this

[warweed]

You could certainly
Be right i guess it depends on the group thou we shall see at the very least I can think of a few small groups who would lease rendering time as well as a few guys doing work on md5 cracking as well as wpa stuff

[JJG]

Not to worrie about resale as I previously stated when to cost to mine out weights the benefits of mining we will be using the gpu "cluster" persay to work on some other projects and lease it out to researchers I'm sure there are alot of people that would love cheap access to that much power

Who knows lol I sure don't will play it by ear

I don't know about that.

You've got a couple of things to overcome:

1) There are already brokers for general purpose cloud-compute capacity but, nothing for GPGPU yet as far as I know.

2) Scientific computing tends toward Nvidia. Nvidia has been working on making itself a player in that area for several years while AMD is just started. People with CUDA code aren't going to have any interest in your cluster.

I expect that #1 will be resolved before long if it isn't underway already. Once that happens, #2 will disappear too.

It would be very interesting to see bitcoin miners end up as next-generation cloud providers.

As someone who has worked with clusters and Universities in the past, I'd say he actually has a lot of obstacles to overcome.

For one, this is as garage-shop as it gets. It's perfectly fine for Bitcoin mining, but it's not anywhere near the complexity required to quickly and easily load a client's software. Furthermore, the hardware outside of the GPUs is sketchy, to say the least. I doubt it has ECC memory or other dependable hardware. The overclocked GPUs are a non-starter as well, although that's easy to fix. Finally, he's going to need some serious bandwidth to his house to allow anyone to connect and move a reasonable amount of data into/out of the cluster. And if the room heats up too much and crashes a few machines in the middle of someone's compute time, it's all over.

Again, absolutely perfect for bitcoin work but a non-starter for academic purposes. Especially with Amazon EC2 providing quick and reliable instances that are billed hourly and available instantly.

[allinvain]

Yeah Edmonton and I was thinking about u of a researchers not having the actual numbers what do you figure the power usage would be say of single machine running a hdd then say a thumb drive ? And I Haven't used Linux coin yet but is it fairly easy to overclock in ? ? I would need to find a cheap source of a bunch of thumb drives in order to do this

All you would need is at max 4 GB usb thumb drives which sell for like $12-20 each I guess if you buy in bulk you can get a discount maybe. Maybe something like this would be suitable:

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139291

A low RPM HD should not eat that much power but a thumb drive eats even less. We're talking watts vs milliwatts here. For example a Samsung F1 640GB is rated 0.7A @ 12V and 0.5A @ 5V - that means max 13 watts power consumption. A USB stick on the other hand will consume much much less than that - max 1 watt. SSH HDs are pretty power efficient too but they're more expensive.

Bear in mind that a USB stick will be slower typically than a HD when booting from it, but who cares cause once the OS is booted you won't be using the drive much (maybe just once in a while for system logs and other stuch miscellaneous items, even this can be disabled and optimized to not occur).

The latest version of LinuxCoin contains all the tools needed to overclock and manage ATI cards. As far as being easy it's as easy as using a command prompt. I don't think there are any GUI based utils for linux yet though.

[marcus_of_augustus]

Definitely out of his depth ... but it is the best way to learn how to swim with the big boys .... good luck ... go for it!

Hint: blow the heat out up through the ceiling as much as possible and bring the new air in through the floor ... heat rises, the top stacks will be hottest ... good luck.
Q^. = m^. C_p delta T

If you can't change temp. difference you gotta move more fluid (air).

[warweed]

bah i give up lol i know that heat rises and cold stays low lol give me a bit of a break

[smooth]

bah i give up lol i know that heat rises and cold stays low lol give me a bit of a break

He's right about deltaT though.  It's going to be really hard to keep the room at a reasonable temperature when it's 35+ outside.  One approach is to just plan for a bit of downtime when it gets too hot. 

[w128]

bah i give up lol i know that heat rises and cold stays low lol give me a bit of a break

He's right about deltaT though.  It's going to be really hard to keep the room at a reasonable temperature when it's 35+ outside.  One approach is to just plan for a bit of downtime when it gets too hot. 

What you really need for such an operation is a centralized throttle that communicates with an agent on each node to dial the clocks back on some or part of the installation as needed instead of losing time entirely due to shutting down. Ideally, this would all be automated via feedback from temperature sensors spread around the room.

[Gameover]

hds are typically 5-15w where a usb stick will be less than 1w, plus you might save some more watts by not having the hdd controller in use.

[allinvain]

bah i give up lol i know that heat rises and cold stays low lol give me a bit of a break

He's right about deltaT though.  It's going to be really hard to keep the room at a reasonable temperature when it's 35+ outside.  One approach is to just plan for a bit of downtime when it gets too hot. 

He needs to move this operation to the Northwest Territories (Just above Alberta where he is) or as close as possible to the north pole as possible . When it's -30 outside I don't think cooling shall be a problem. I'm being facetious here but lol someone crazy enough may do this

[allinvain]

hds are typically 5-15w where a usb stick will be less than 1w, plus you might save some more watts by not having the hdd controller in use.

He could also massively underclock each CPU and the RAM. If they're all AMD boards then turn on that cool'n'quiet junk. If he wants to be even more extreme maybe underclock the cpus so much that he can passively cool them?

[warweed]

What I was reading in the linuxcoin thread was this list

Enable overclocking ..

Code:

aticonfig --enable-od

next lets get the clocks

Code:

aticonfig --odgc --adapter=your adapter

Set them to what you want.

Code:

aticonfig --odsc 900,900 --adapter=youradapter

And commit them

Code:

aticonfig --odcc --adapter=youradapter

And set the fan speed to 70% (a good setting for most 5XXX&6XXX cards)

Code:

DISPLAY=:0.youradapter aticonfig --pplib-cmd="set fanspeed 0 70"

Here's a little bash magic to test your card temps.

Code:

while true; do
        aticonfig --adapter=0 --od-gettemperature | tail -n1 | awk '{print "Current temp: " $5}' ;
        aticonfig --adapter=0 --od-gettemperature | tail -n1 | awk '{print "Current temp: " $5}' ;
        echo $(aticonfig --odgc --adapter=0| grep GPU);
        echo $(aticonfig --odgc --adapter=1| grep GPU);
# Next lines are to check your balance if solo mining
#        BALANCE=$(bitcoind getbalance)
#        echo -ne "Bitcoin Balance: ${BALANCE}\r";
        sleep 35;
        clear
done

But I will look into adding AMDoverdrivectl. Diablo miner will be added on the next version and I will take a look at hashkill.

The MD5 hash don't match with the file i downloaded from this site today.
my hash is   MD5: d50c4d3a38a1349111bac5f69b9571f1  linuxcoin-v0.1b-ati-cd.iso
while it says CD MD5: 71e5253bc5bda47003c57d71c52db869  linuxcoin-v0.1b-ati-cd.iso
My file size is 684 MB (717,387,776 bytes) on win7 32.
Who is wrong?

The md5sun for the CD version is 28bc5b424e3f33779f67fbe4fe1a9a67 I'll update now.

Don't forget the USB version is uploaded now
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