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Topic: [ANN][BLC] Blakecoin Blake-256 for GPU/FPGA With Merged Mined Pools Stable Net - page 145. (Read 409569 times)

legendary
Activity: 1509
Merit: 1030
Solutions Architect
Thanks to kramble for pointing this out  Wink

Quote from the Litecoin Release Notes:
"win32 builds contained a problematic version of the boost library that would occasionally cause all network activity to fail until the client is restarted.  This annoyance was solved with an upgrade to boost-1.55 for the win32 builds." http://blog.litecoin.org/2014/01/litecoin-0862-release-notes.html

I will try a new build 0.9.0 and if it is stable and builds ok will release within a few days, I do hope this also fixes the same type of bug we have seen in Blakecoin  Cool
sr. member
Activity: 274
Merit: 254
looks like we'll have to find a new exchange to trade on, openex.pw was riddled with insecurites. hopefully no one here lost any coins from it.
legendary
Activity: 1470
Merit: 1001
Use Coinbase Account almosanywhere with Shift card
Well I have a new PC. Taking old PC (8 GIG Ram 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo) and making it my Miner PC converting it Unbuntu 12.4. Then to get the CM1 mining blake on it again. Also just got a X6500 rev3 will use to mine SHA256 altcoins until I can get it onto blake.

sounds cool, I am using ubuntu 12.04 x64 on the servers so I could help if you get stuck, I also have the mcs for the CM1 if you need it?

Thanks I probably will need the mcs. but tonight is just getting the disto up and running.
legendary
Activity: 1509
Merit: 1030
Solutions Architect
Well I have a new PC. Taking old PC (8 GIG Ram 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo) and making it my Miner PC converting it Unbuntu 12.4. Then to get the CM1 mining blake on it again. Also just got a X6500 rev3 will use to mine SHA256 altcoins until I can get it onto blake.

sounds cool, I am using ubuntu 12.04 x64 on the servers so I could help if you get stuck, I also have the mcs for the CM1 if you need it?
legendary
Activity: 1470
Merit: 1001
Use Coinbase Account almosanywhere with Shift card
Well I have a new PC. Taking old PC (8 GIG Ram 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo) and making it my Miner PC converting it Unbuntu 12.4. Then to get the CM1 mining blake on it again. Also just got a X6500 rev3 will use to mine SHA256 altcoins until I can get it onto blake.
legendary
Activity: 1509
Merit: 1030
Solutions Architect
Excuse me but what did I miss here? I tried to mine with GPUMiner Scrypt with GPU on 2 pools, on both getting just stale/invalid shares.

Should I be doing something else?

did you read the OP this is a Blake-256 based coin not a Scrypt coin  Roll Eyes

as sprinkles said check the OP all software is listed and it is also listed in the "Getting Started Guide" on both pools  Wink
sr. member
Activity: 397
Merit: 250
Excuse me but what did I miss here? I tried to mine with GPUMiner Scrypt with GPU on 2 pools, on both getting just stale/invalid shares.

Should I be doing something else?

You need to use the 'cgminer-alt' (link in the original post).
legendary
Activity: 1120
Merit: 1000
Excuse me but what did I miss here? I tried to mine with GPUMiner Scrypt with GPU on 2 pools, on both getting just stale/invalid shares.

Should I be doing something else?
sr. member
Activity: 384
Merit: 250
That said, I happen to have a BFL FPGA Single. I'm sure there are other people who have also stayed away from the ASIC refund, and it could be a nice engine for Blake. The sha256 performance is similar to a Ztex 1.15y. I recall reading it has two fairly high-end Altera chips, possibly of the Stratix family. (The heatsinks are glued on, so I haven't checked.)

We discussed this on another thread (it was a bit cluttered, so I'll just quote a couple of posts) ...

Let me say, I do not think they are scrap.  They do have a value, it is just pretty low.  They can be used as an FPGA dev platform.  That is why I say I would buy a few for $30 each.  But I will never get that $30 back mining BTC.  
Last I checked they were cryptographically locked to BFL's FPGA images and BFL won't provide the info needed to reprogram them. IIRC they also can't be reprogramed over the USB bus.

That's useful info. I was wondering if it might be worth porting my litecoin miner onto them, but I'll stick with the Lancelot and Ztex for now. Its just a hobby project anyway as the return on mining LTC would be minimal at the sort of hash rates I'm achieving (It was a challenge ... lots of people said FPGA couldn't do scrypt, well it can, just not very well Tongue ).

That can easily be fixed. The crypto keys can be removed with a JTAG.

yep ok ..... the  BFL bit-files will no longer work, but it's not as if you need them.

They have two, quite expensive, FPGA chips inside. They could be recovered and used elsewhere.

According to Ngzhang they are EP3SL150F780 https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ok-i-confirmed-the-model-of-fpga-they-are-using-in-bfl-single-79825
Some additional info https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/paid-bounty-5-btc-for-die-size-of-altera-ep3sl150f780-aka-bfl-single-123155

However the bitstream is protected (see http://www.altera.co.uk/literature/wp/wp-01010.pdf) and if BFL used the poly-fuse option rather than battery-backup, the devices may be unusable (I defer to rasorfishsl upthread, but AFAIK poly-fuses are one-time programmable and if the tamper flag is set the devices are junk without the master key).

So according to rasorfishsl it is possible, then according to kramble (me) its not (but I could be wrong). I guess the best way to proceed is to get the JTAG working first (it may need some hardware hacking), check the status of the protection and tamper FUSE, and proceed from there.
newbie
Activity: 44
Merit: 0

Please specify things like your OS, AMD APP SDK version, ./configure options and so on. I managed it on Linux with SDK 2.9 and --disable-icarus --disable-adl --enable-opencl.
Thanks for replay,
Trying to compile it on windows 8.1 with MinGW. Using AMD SDK v2.8. I was trying to follow the windows-build.txt: https://github.com/kR105/cgminer/blob/3.7/windows-build.txt

I want to try cgminer 3.7.2 because cgminer 3.1.1 is using too much my cpu (about 90%), I am on AMD Sempron 140. Mining other coins with cgminer 3.7.2 it uses only 8%.
sr. member
Activity: 520
Merit: 253
555
Hello there,
Can anyone help me to compile cgminer 3.7 from kR105.

Please specify things like your OS, AMD APP SDK version, ./configure options and so on. I managed it on Linux with SDK 2.9 and --disable-icarus --disable-adl --enable-opencl.
newbie
Activity: 44
Merit: 0
Hello there,
Can anyone help me to compile cgminer 3.7 from kR105. Actually I am getting errors en cgminer.c :
Undefined reference to "opt_blake256"
Undefined reference to "blake256_reg"


Thanks in advance.
sr. member
Activity: 520
Merit: 253
555
I am quite keen on re purposing equipment for new tasks so might have a soft spot towards fpga's Grin    

My thoughts exactly Cool I try to buy only hardware I could learn to program myself, in a spirit of open source. There is also the arms race mentality about ASICs that I have a slight problem with; an early ASIC could soon be obsolete, but you could still develop something revolutionary on an old FPGA, GPU or CPU.

That said, I happen to have a BFL FPGA Single. I'm sure there are other people who have also stayed away from the ASIC refund, and it could be a nice engine for Blake. The sha256 performance is similar to a Ztex 1.15y. I recall reading it has two fairly high-end Altera chips, possibly of the Stratix family. (The heatsinks are glued on, so I haven't checked.)

If someone can port Blake on this thing, I am willing to donate mine for research. I have a feeling these FPGAs won't be accessible with the free Quartus, and there may be other software/electrical issues to reverse engineer.
legendary
Activity: 1509
Merit: 1030
Solutions Architect
does blakecoin favor asics?

yes but perhaps not how you may think. it is not compatible with bitcoin/sha-256 asics. however, the blake algorithm is very efficient and would be relatively simple and inexpensive to implement in silicon (relative to scrypt for example). there are no asics for blake yet, however i believe there is some documentation available about implementing blake in asic. there is also fpga support for blakecoin, and my understanding is that fpgas are used for prototyping asic designs. so this is good because if blakecoin gains enough momentum to warrant asic production, it will result in extremely high hashrates with very low power draw (much better than possible with sha256 asics). hope that helps

that's about right but with fpga's you do get them in different categories not all are for asic development e.g the lx150 used on the ztex board are designed for industrial/automotive applications and the other lx150 used on the other fpga boards are considered "Low-Cost FPGAs" rather than for asic development which would be more of the mid/high end fpga range.

Quote Xilinx:
"Spartan®-6 FPGA delivers an optimal balance of low risk, low cost, and low power for cost-sensitive applications, now with 42% less power consumption and 12% increased performance over previous generation devices. Spartan-6 FPGAs offer advanced power management technology, up to 150K logic cells, integrated PCI Express® blocks, advanced memory support, 250MHz DSP slices, and 3.2Gbps low-power transceivers."

* Newer fpga's out now with better fmax and lower power due to 28nm-20nm designs, and higher end fpga's from Altera already at 14nm  Shocked
* Altera used to do a thing called hardcopy (fpga->asic) but they have stopped that http://www.altera.co.uk/devices/asic/asic-index.html  Cry

so I like to think of fpga's as re-programmable hardware while asic is optimal for one task only e.g its fixed to one algorithm

some consumer, networking and broadcast equipment use fpga's is production devices same is true in automotive industry here is an example:
http://hackaday.com/2013/05/08/hdmi-color-processing-board-used-as-an-fpga-dev-board-to-mine-bitcoins/

the same fpga's used for mining Bitcoin can be reused for mining Blakecoin so you can see the flexibility that an fpga has over asic

I am quite keen on re purposing equipment for new tasks so might have a soft spot towards fpga's Grin    

asic's will always get higher frequency and lower power usage as it is only designed for that one task, only thing left is to shrink the design like we have seen with CPU's over the years   Wink

the volume of Blakecoin does not justify the huge cost of asic production/design yet, GPU and fpga mining should be possible for a few years at least

very good explanation bzyzny  Cool
sr. member
Activity: 274
Merit: 254
does blakecoin favor asics?

yes but perhaps not how you may think. it is not compatible with bitcoin/sha-256 asics. however, the blake algorithm is very efficient and would be relatively simple and inexpensive to implement in silicon (relative to scrypt for example). there are no asics for blake yet, however i believe there is some documentation available about implementing blake in asic. there is also fpga support for blakecoin, and my understanding is that fpgas are used for prototyping asic designs. so this is good because if blakecoin gains enough momentum to warrant asic production, it will result in extremely high hashrates with very low power draw (much better than possible with sha256 asics). hope that helps
newbie
Activity: 19
Merit: 0
does blakecoin favor asics?
sr. member
Activity: 274
Merit: 254
I've tried these, and both 5870s and 7970s are slightly faster with 14. There are the occasional rejects, though, it's hard to say whether they are due to intensity or just the usual issues with pools and networks.

the ideal intensity varies from card to card. rejects happen from time to time, from spikes in network latency and such. also make sure to have this line in your config file:

"no-submit-stale": true

sr. member
Activity: 520
Merit: 253
555
did you try a lower intensity? my card decreases gh/s when over 12

I've tried these, and both 5870s and 7970s are slightly faster with 14. There are the occasional rejects, though, it's hard to say whether they are due to intensity or just the usual issues with pools and networks.
sr. member
Activity: 274
Merit: 254
My commandline only has
Code:
./cgminer --blake256 -o http://nanite:8772/ -u teknohog -p XXXXX -I 14

did you try a lower intensity? my card decreases gh/s when over 12
sr. member
Activity: 384
Merit: 250
Improved Ztex 1.15x bitstream (168-180MHz) will be available soon (max tomorrow).

Via PM (thanks)

Quote
Fresh, new faster bitstream is available.

Results:
Ztex 1.15x clone - grade 2 chip: 168MHz stable with 0 HW, 7.6W power with 40mm fan
Ztex 1.15x         - grade 3 chip: 180MHz stable with 0 HW, 8.7W power with 40mm fan (360MH/s).

I'll do another attempt to hit 200MHz.

Bitstream is at https://www.dropbox.com/s/polv7bu899w4bmi/hal7_ztex_ufm1_15d4_2core_v03.bit

I'll update the github tomorrow.
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