I am curious if someone has built a bitcoin miner that exploits the hardware available on the TX2… any pointers would be appreciated.
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I don’t think that’s worth it. The large ASIC farms have the GPUs pretty much beat, no matter how power efficient the GPU is at being a GPU. You’re paying for generality you don’t need.
For example, the cost of an AntMiner S7 is about the same as a Jetson TX2 module, and it hashes several 100x faster at only 15x the power draw.
But, by all means, install CUDAMiner and see what it does :-)
ASICs are an order of magnitude more efficient. ASIC mining in general is only profitable if you have lots of money to drop and lots of cheap/free electricity. GPU mining on the other hand…
It would be interesting to see someone get an auto-switching algo interface like nicehash or any of the command-line GPU miners working with the jetson tegra modules, just to see what they’re capable of
Interesting subject. What could one generate, a nickel a day? A dollar? Just looking for some scale here.
I spent some time to make sure CudaMiner could be built and run on Jetson TX2. Please check out my repository.
https://github.com/jkjung-avt/CudaMiner
Running the benchmark (scrypt algorithm) on Jetson TX2, I got roughly 80 khash/s.
According to the documentation (https://github.com/jkjung-avt/CudaMiner/blob/master/README.txt), CudaMiner does not support BitCoin. I wonder what would be a good coin to mine with CudaMiner today…
We're not supporting Quark, ProtoShares (Momentum) or any other
highly specialized "CPU-only" coin. And certainly no BitCoin:
This train has left the station quite some time ago!
-a, --algo=ALGO specify the algorithm to use (default is scrypt)
scrypt scrypt Salsa20/8(1024, 1, 1), PBKDF2(SHA2)
scrypt:N scrypt Salsa20/8(N, 1, 1), PBKDF2(SHA2)
scrypt-jane scrypt Chacha20/8(N, 1, 1), PBKDF2(Keccak)
scrypt-jane:Coin
Coin must be one of the supported coins.
scrypt-jane:Nfactor
scrypt-chacha20/8(2*2^Nfactor, 1, 1)
scrypt-jane:StartTime,Nfmin,Nfmax
like above nFactor derived from Unix time.
sha256d SHA-256d (don't use this! No GPU acceleration)
keccak Keccak256 as used in MaxCoin
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Huh, so the TX2 has several co-processors: Pascal GPU, Video CODEC, do the miners use the GPU ?
Bitcoin mining can be done with CPU, GPU, or ASIC (application specific integrated circuits – custom chips.) Because there’s about a 10x energy-efficiency ratio bump at each step on that chain, almost all bitcoin mining in the world uses ASICs. And while the Jetson TX2 is an energy-efficient GPU, it is not as efficient at Bitcoin mining as the ASIC based mining systems, and thus Jetson-based mining would only be a curiosity, not a way to make money out of consuming electricity.
(GPU miners dropping bitcoin support comes from this problem – that industry moves fast!)
Ethereum mining can be done using CPU and GPU, but Ethereum is designed to not be easily accelerated by ASICs for … unclear reasons. Thus, it may be possible to energy-efficiently mine Ethereum on the Jetson TX2.
I previously took a look at building the tools needed to do this, but unfortunately the various tools I checked either use x86_64 specific code, or have sub-dependencies on tools that are newer than what’s available on Ubuntu 16.04 that’s on the Jetson, so that would require more effort than I wanted to spend to make work. If someone else makes it work, I’d love to see a patch set.
I forked the CudaMiner repository from GitHub - noxo/CudaMiner: a CUDA accelerated litecoin mining application based on pooler's CPU miner, and did some modification so as to make it build and work on Jetson TX2.
[url]https://github.com/jkjung-avt/CudaMiner[/url]
From what I can see, this CudaMiner mainly implemented “scrypt” algorithms in CUDA. I managed to have my Jetson TX2 successfully mining “LTC” coin from [url]https://coinotron.com/[/url], but very slowly. I think this is just for learning, instead of really making money out of it.
Ethereum hasn’t been the most profitable coin to mine for a long time with maxwell and pascal, just FYI. There are much more profitable coins to mine, and algos that auto-switch every hour based on market rates.
Try nicehash on windows sometime to see an example of what I mean, it’s good stuff. I’ve made enough to upgrade nicely to dual an 1800x dual 1080ti (with evga hybrid cooling) for modeling. It’s also paid for this jetson, and will pay for an x399 system and a threadripper and vega FE once it’s out.
Tons of money out there to be made if you’re into crypto, especially on the GPU front, but it’s more of a curiosity on the jetson. Though if someone could make it run properly, a cluster of them might be power efficient enough to be worth it (total speculation there, it’s just as likely to be a dead end).
double post
I get that speed with Nvidia graphic card on my pc, TX2 is very slow indeed, how it is super computer
I’m mining at incredible rate of 118 K :-)))))
Someone has experience in about?
this is my command§:
./cudaminer -d 0 -l K28x32 -C 2 -i 0 -o stratum+tcp://coinotron.com:3334 -O myname.miner:pwd
Necro’ing this topic.
I’ve been working w/volta and mining recently.
Here is how the mining metagame works. You mine by proxy.
- mine a gpu coin (other than bitcoin) on a pool that autoexchanges to eth/btc/ltc
- goto 1
ccminer is the best miner for nvidia gpus for lyra2v2 (the most profitable algorithm), nist5 is most profitable for older gpus (gtx970).
When you read the code though…
Basic things like grid-stride are missing, invariants everywhere. And now the “optimization” is moving to hard coding everything instead of calling cublas/etc.
E.g.
I’ve been tinkering with some minor optimizations, and my volta cards get 240MH/s doing lyra2v2, but my cuda-foo is weak and the ccminer code has zero documentations. I can’t tell what the intents were to figure out how to leverage unified memory, cooperatives, cublas, etc.
That’s 500-700 dollars a month assuming prices for the big coins stay static. (they have been generally up in a bubble/pop/bubble/pop upwards cycle).
Here is a popular ccminer fork running at basic thread rate:
nvprof --timeout 5 ./repos/KlausT/ccminer-stable -a lyra2v2 --benchmark --no-cpu-verify
ccminer 8.17-KlausT (64bit) for nVidia GPUs
Compiled with GCC 6.3 using Nvidia CUDA Toolkit 9.1
Based on pooler cpuminer 2.3.2 and the tpruvot@github fork
CUDA support by Christian Buchner, Christian H. and DJM34
Includes optimizations implemented by sp-hash, klaust, tpruvot and tsiv.
==25539== NVPROF is profiling process 25539, command: ./repos/KlausT/ccminer-stable -a lyra2v2 --benchmark --no-cpu-verify
[2017-12-26 13:32:41] NVML GPU monitoring enabled.
[2017-12-26 13:32:41] 2 miner threads started, using 'lyra2v2' algorithm.
0
1
[2017-12-26 13:32:42] GPU #1 Found nonce 81882010
[2017-12-26 13:32:42] GPU #0 Found nonce 03dad570
[2017-12-26 13:32:42] GPU #0: Graphics Device, 95.28 MH/s
[2017-12-26 13:32:42] GPU #1 Found nonce 84550c7f
[2017-12-26 13:32:42] GPU #1: Graphics Device, 95.09 MH/s
[2017-12-26 13:32:42] Total: 190.37 MH/s
That’s 190MH/s without upping the threadcount. Now look at the profile.
==25539== Profiling result:
Type Time(%) Time Calls Avg Min Max Name
GPU activities: 38.93% 3.59935s 1646 2.1867ms 2.1761ms 2.1989ms cubehash256_gpu_hash_32(unsigned int, unsigned int, uint2*)
23.76% 2.19679s 823 2.6693ms 2.6543ms 2.6832ms lyra2v2_gpu_hash_32_2(unsigned int)
11.87% 1.09731s 936 1.1723ms 1.2160us 10.353ms [CUDA memcpy DtoH]
8.86% 818.63ms 823 994.69us 986.30us 1.0124ms blakeKeccak256_gpu_hash_80(unsigned int, unsigned int, unsigned int*)
5.95% 549.87ms 823 668.13us 660.06us 678.81us skein256_gpu_hash_32(unsigned int, unsigned int, unsigned long*)
5.50% 508.91ms 823 618.36us 612.45us 622.72us lyra2v2_gpu_hash_32_1(unsigned int, uint2*)
3.15% 291.00ms 823 353.58us 342.69us 366.05us lyra2v2_gpu_hash_32_3(unsigned int, uint2*)
1.96% 180.76ms 823 219.63us 218.05us 221.60us bmw256_gpu_hash_32(unsigned int, unsigned int, uint2*, unsigned int*, unsigned int)
0.02% 1.8387ms 936 1.9640us 896ns 24.811us [CUDA memset]
0.00% 83.752us 40 2.0930us 1.0240us 24.749us [CUDA memcpy HtoD]
0.00% 3.7440us 2 1.8720us 1.7600us 1.9840us get_cuda_arch_gpu(int*)
API calls: 83.74% 9.04112s 936 9.6593ms 20.928us 13.746ms cudaMemcpy
5.43% 586.06ms 2 293.03ms 228.17ms 357.89ms cudaDeviceSetCacheConfig
4.32% 466.06ms 8 58.257ms 167.71us 227.87ms cudaMalloc
1.91% 206.70ms 2 103.35ms 357.24us 206.34ms cudaDeviceReset
1.87% 202.03ms 7490 26.973us 5.3520us 1.7468ms cudaLaunch
The kernel here is one optimized by hand unrolling all the matrixes (as i mentioned before).
ref: ccminer/cuda_cubehash256.cu at cuda9 · KlausT/ccminer · GitHub
You would need to convert invariant code to flexible code to make sure everything just works on an embedded system like this.
But yes, even a Jetson could be a mining device, especially if the matrix math could be done using newer cuda libs and letting tensor cores do some of the matrix ops. You would just have the jetsons connect to auto-switching mining pools mining coins nvidia excels at, but also optimizing those to reduce memcpy while offloading anything that can be done as a matrix transform to tensor cores. The matrix logic is currently being purged for inline everything though in the mining code.
Or I could be wrong. This has been my winter break project.
What about now though since most mining farms were based in China and now that China is basically banning everything that has to do with Crypto Currencies claiming it is because of the power usage which is estimated to be something like 4 Gigawatts of Electricity which is about equivalent to Three Nuclear Reactors production levels. I have a feeling that is going to leave a Gaping Hole in the Bitcoin Mining Industry! I just have a feeling that there will be a new surge in Bitcoin Mining again. But who knows I am the furthest thing from a expert on all of this I just find it all so fascinating how something that doesn’t even technically exist could be worth so much and I am not just talking dollars!
Charlie,
The question of “why crypto currencies?” has several answers. The most common response is that ‘It is easy to trade’. My question is 'Can the TX2 with all the silicon, etc. it has, be used as a good to excellent crypto miner."
That is a good point that China has outlawed bitcoin. I wonder if they will actually stop mining it.
Y-