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RE: Why I Only 'Mine' Gridcoin, and My Unusual ~200 TFLOPS Mining Setup
What an incredible setup!
I just started mining Gridcoin one week ago and I got really into it thanks to you. Your posts on steemit and reddit were about 90% of all the important information that I needed during this week. Your work is not just helpful, but your writing style is also fantastic.
Since your are running that many GPUs and CPUs, I wanted to ask you for some advice on my setup and the project I am crunching at the moment. I have an i5-7600k and a gtx 1060 running at the moment and I use grcpool.com. The projects I mainly crunch are SRBase (mainly), NFS@home (backup) and Amicable Numbers (GPU). Do you think that makes sense?
I'm very glad to hear that you are able to get something useful out of my writing, so thank you a lot for letting me know! =)
Nice CPU, and the graphics card is nothing to look past either. I used to run SRBase about a month or two ago when the project was still very quiet at less than 700k RAC. It now has over 3 million RAC so it has become a lot more competitive! This is the trend with most projects, where they are optimal choices one day and not the next - best not to min-max it too hard.
That being said, looking on gridcoinstats we can see that for CPU the VGTU, Cosmology and LHC projects are good choices. Sztaki is about to be removed from the whitelist, so not a good one to crunch for. That being said, SRBase is not bad as it hands out credit (which builds RAC) more generously than most other projects. I have never looked at NFS, sorry. =/
For GPU, seeing as you have a single precision focused gaming card, maybe have a look at something like SETI.
Remember that the beauty of the GRC minting model is that it encourages evenly distributed compute from Team Gridcoin - most projects get a turn at being optimum.
One follow up on GPU: You mentioned SETI. However, in the other guides I thought to have read to go for low number of users. Amicable Numbers is one of the lowest and SETI the second highest. Is Amicable Numbers not made for single precision cards and I should look at SETI because of that or did I get something else wrong? Thanks for your help!
All GPU projects are fine for single precision cards, except for MilkyWay@Home where the double precision cards will shred all the competition.
You are right that SETI has lots of users, but many are inactive or running only their CPUs on the project. I have not actually run Amicable Numbers myself, so I cannot compare the rate of credit handouts though... I cannot say which is more efficient.
The nice thing about SETI is it can use your integrated graphics chips, which most other projects can't. A little extra power that otherwise goes unused. Regardless of what your GPU does, it's worth pointing your integrated chip to SETI.
In general, low users and low RAC is good - but low RAC could be due to the project handing out credit slowly, and high users could be largely inactive... You never know.
Okay, very helpful again :) I therefore have a closer look at the Team RAC instead of the number of users!
Both are important. :D
I just wanted to try out SETI now and faced a problem: If I run SETI, it uses 0.3CPUs compared to the 0.0899 Amicable Numbers needs. This means, that I can either let 3 CPU workloads + 1 SETI workload rund, or 4 CPU Workloads and SETI at 60%CPU usage, since the gpu is bottlenecked by the lack of CPU I guess.
Both solutions do not seem very satisfactory to me. Can I somehow use the other .7 of this CPU core or would I just have to let do not much?
Yes - just run your CPUs at 100% load. The GPU will take priority over the CPU work, and only be very slightly throttled at worst. I tested this and noted very limited throttling.
The only time when you need to keep a whole core or two free for your GPU is when your GPU is effectively doing all your mining (it is the star of your rig), such as an FP64 GPU on MilkyWay@Home would be.
Effectively, setting your CPUs to 100% will let your system run one GPU job at practically 100%, three CPU jobs at 100%, and one CPU job at 70% load. Check task manager and you can verify. =)
I am running Ubuntu, and watching the GPU usage, I see only 40-60% being used when I run SETI and 4 cores. Amicable Numbers used the GPU 100%. Could it be, that my CPU is just not fast enough with its 30% for the GPU?
I doubt it. What does the GPU usage on SETI look like with one CPU left idle for it?
Then it goes to ~90%
That is 18kW/hr that would not be powered on or that would be at a much lower power state using much less draw. That seems to go against team Gridcoin's moto and claim to fame that Boinc/Gridcoin uses the IDLE left over unused power of machines that normally would be on but not doing anything but sitting running system background processes. Unless you are a University ( no better than kikipope and that brings up more questions and gray areas and legalities so I wont go there ) you are actually causing more power usage over all because not only are you running all of that hardware but the rest of the team has to run more hardware just to maintain earnings. I think it's time someone re-writes " instead of generating unnecessary heat and wasted power for the proof of work algorithms required to keep the coin network running. It is estimated that bitcoin is using approximately 23,312 megawatt hours per day " in our team description and puts down truths and facts vs knocking another. Thank you for pointing out the massive power sucker Gridcoin is growing to be , maybe we can fix that before it gets too out of hand and the quest to actually help the world by science is actually harm defeating the intended outcome. No I am not saying hug a tree , that tree needs to die for more to grow and stand in its place but maybe its time for a revamp and Gridcoin v3.0.