Topic: [ANN] Spondoolies-Tech - carrier grade, data center ready mining rigs - page 164. (Read 1260395 times)

It would be worth it to me, 5% improvement in efficiency when its hard enough barely breaking even... is all the difference.

"Worth it" to whom? To GenTrakin personally or to the Spondoolies' Corporation and their future industrial scale mining operation partners?

5% may be nothing to a piker but the same 5% yield improvement at the industrial scale means megabucks.

But is it worth it? How much would you gain? If it's less than 5% then it's not such a big gain...

I agree, just watching how the miner behaves when I specify a working max Wattage, my units are clearly not getting the best GH/W possible. Like I said, they clock themselves down for no apparent reason... Also, an error rate of 2% is acceptable, these things allow virtually no errors, which I believe is the reason for the aggressive declocking =(

I bet I could hand tune clocks / voltages statically better than their autotuning does...

Don't worry about the guide. There are plenty of member that will happily help you  
Some of useful guide:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/unofficial-spondoolies-sp20-thread-872014
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/guide-dogies-comprehensive-spondooliestech-sp20-setup-hd-886633

I think that you are wrong. I'm following this thread from the beginning and observed a very rapid release cycle with multiple regressions which is indicative of the developers thrashing around without understanding what is going on with the product in the field.

I also noticed multiple user complaints about things like "entire ASIC loops disabled by BIST". I believe zvisha has already discovered a while back that GO/NO GO BIST that he had inherited from the Spondoolies' hardware designer is counterproductive and overly cautious. The use of BIST (in the field) should be completely abandoned now, it could be still valuable in the factory or in the pre-final-assembly stages.

I don't know what is the internal personal dynamics of Spondoolies as a corporation. Does zvisha have enough inside clout to say NO! to some rather trivial support requests via Skype/ssh/Teamviewer? Can he influence the hardware designer to give him more information from the chip that just a single go/no-go bit and a temperature?

What is required now is not more of "finer tuning". There's a need to step back and do some real research and appraisal of the entire field and how it is changing to more and more unattended operation. The cute "Thank you for the personal attention!" notices from the customers may be pleasant now, but they are actually indicative of the production problems in the factory.

^I think you are making a trivial issue into a major product fault that it isnt.

The Sp20 is already leading-edge for efficiency, and while theres a little space to improve efficiency with a little bit finer tuning processes, it might only be by 0.02-0.04w/GH

My not so subtle response to this: Spondoolies hired a single junior/young software developer who had landed far out of his depth with regards to state-of-the-art of the optimization of rather complex analog/digital system. His attempts at one-dimensional optimization problems when searching for the optimal configuration parameters show that he isn't aware of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_section_search known since mid-1950 or mid-1960. And various folks here already started to request optimization in 2 or more dimensions. This is going to end up rather badly with regards to the software quality when the corporation gives his lead developer no time to actually research the problem space. Instead they gave him a mishmash of tasks from the request list that are rather trivial and cosmetic.

So my friendly advice to zvisha is: step away from fulfilling trivial maintenance requests and broaden your knowledge with a quick peek into gradient-free/derivative-free optimization methods that I've mentioned. The payoff to him (personally) and the company and its user base will be much higher.

My not so subtle advice to Guy: you'll need to give time to your staff to do an actual research as opposed to bogging them down with constant development and maintenance requests. Your company's current work on finding the optimal operating point for your miners is equivalent to the state-of-the-art around World War II. Either give zvisha some time off of D and let him concentrate on R (from R&D) or hire a actual mathematical optimization consultant. This should be quite easy in your location in Israel.

I actually don't care if you open source it or keep it as a closed-source module that controls the cgminer through its API. You could probably then charge extra for it or differentiate your product from the competition in marketing.

The above was a free advice. If you don't like it just ask and I will give you a full refund of the money paid.

You can ask here any question that you might have.

I have found and examined the "SP20 Jackson Quick Start Guide". At the tail end of that 9 page document there is a reference to "SP20 Jackson User Guide" for further details. I have been unable to find the "SP20 User Guide" anywhere. Does this document exist, and if so where?  Is the "SP3x User Guide" useful at all for the SP20? Sorry if this is an silly  question, but I couldn't find anything relevant here.

I wish this was true. You can fork it and use it as you code the changes, but Zvi has limited time to review any pulls. I can still see that the UI on the latest SP 20 still have some errors which I tried to rectify since I got my SP30 .. forked the stuff, did the changes, which were never implemented by SP-T due to the lack of time .. The pull request is still there  .. but I stopped asking, eventually in the end, the units are hashing ..

Nevertheless, code repositories are good, and I'm an end-user. Probably the exception which confirms the rule.


 

just got an SP20 that was producing serial connection errors (not i2c) in loop 0 and would not hash. reseating the cables did not solve the problem.

turns out swapping the serial ribbon cables moved the error over to loop 2 - so the unit works! I just need a new ribbon cable for it. (@spondoolies? I emailed benny already - hopefully i can get a replacement to recover the missing 25% of the unit)

Wow. Solid.

Correct.

Edit: What they said ^

I think the above was just Spondoolies-Tech's slightly unsubtly way of saying: Hey, our software is open source.  Here's our git repository.  Feel free to fork it, make changes - such as the suggested Nelder–Mead approach for N-dimensional optimization, and submit pull requests, and we'd be happy to review the changes and possible integrate them into our baseline - or you can provide your own custom builds for users who would be interested in it.

Code repositories are generally not intended for end-users

The git URL was posted to allow 2112 to improve our firmware per her/his suggestion.

Is there anything more descriptive than a Git repository URL? When you go there, you are confronted with 8 "things" that I assume are kinda like directories. When you dive into them, there are bits of code and stuff. Wouldn't it make more sense to give folks guidance  on how to achieve the desired goal using settings in the GUI? Am I just being too dense on this?

https://github.com/Spondoolies-Tech

You guys should pressure Zvisha and Spondoolies to implement a proper gradient-free multi-dimensional optimization method in their software:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelder–Mead_method

Do not reinvent the wheel!

in my opinion if you limit both max power (too low) AND max voltage, then the machine cannot optimize chip voltage properly and is run (at least sometime) sub-optimally.