Topic: Mini-Rig from Butterflylabs - page 6. (Read 21155 times)

Well - time to order a few Raspberry Pi just incase 

I do not see a need for this. Let's let BFL do what they are good at. Making FPGA chips hash like crazy.

Plugging in a rig box (or two mini rig boxes) to a host PC adds at most 100w draw.

You can use cgminer with BAMT or other monitoring tools to do this and they already exist. I can monitor all of my singles from the web, ssh, email and my phone. What more do you really need?

+1

Your likely right but it would be awesome to have a device with "internal host" and possibly a web interface for control and monitoring.

For now I THINK they require a host PC - which could be something like Raspberry Pi 

One more question come to my mind.

Are these rigs will have a network connection or we have to connect it to a PC via USB?

I'd prefer the Kids-that-should-not-follow-their-successful-parents-in-to-acting-except-for-the-Douglas'-and-Sheen's humanitarian award.

I'll take the STFU award, too.

[insert joke about bfl delivery here]

Epic!

And here's the pic courtesy of Google:
http://d3j5vwomefv46c.cloudfront.net/photos/full/461193010.jpg?key=157360&Expires=1332789717&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIYVGSUJFNRFZBBTA&Signature=nnS02jNGZayfrIxgBTGlXJuip5mHukWlM-ffJqAFG0YcgdBwk8nqq4qN9UBMGGav2IcyAGTIt-TxmF09u~23sobcz-1ey4~xoVcmZM94zxxAgDeqkkr5rzfQiXf5jgCxxOFbTaCVbSIZgKs7NTw4nJ0MjCu9gLtugf8nWUdg3fg_

The Golden Sphincter Award. You've earned it, nedbert9.

All that trouble to describe a diagram. I would like to give nedbert9 an award, but I'm still trying to figure out which one is most appropriate.

Let's say, hypothetically, that I had this "friend."  Let's say this hypothetical friend had super powers much like a theoretical rainman-style, although mute, kid on a possibly terrible new Fox action-drama staring a one-style-fits-all actor, who coincidentally has a fellow actor father that possesses acting chops that far surpass his own with a last name of Sutherland.

So, hypothetically remember, this mute kid might leave an etch-a-sketch laying around with the words, "16 boards, vertical orientation, in a 10"x24" area."

Interesting.


Why does BFL always wish me good luck?  Do they think I am in competition with them?

I wish I could give you some info, but at this point please let us have our final unit in front of us before
giving out details. Regarding the dB, it will be virtually silent when compared to GPUs... In fact, it is
engineered that way...


Good Luck,

So share the images (the CAD ones not the sphincter ones).

I've seen the Mini Rig CAD mockup and the dense board placement makes my sphincter tense up.  Which sphincter?  All of them.

I wonder that myself.  I wonder how large it will need to be not because the FPGA take up a lot of space but due to the fact that 2.5KW is a lot of energy and the smaller the pkg the harder it is to cool.  

A visual excercise:
A 4x5970 rig is ~1KW.  Open framed it requires good amount of airflow to cool.   In a closed case, forget about it.  Now 1.25KW would be 20% more thermal load so image a hypothetical 5x5970 rig (pretend no 8 GPU limit). The "full rig box" (if it ends up getting built) would be double that.   To get an idea of the thermal energy vs volume visualize a 4U server chassis w/ 5x5970s inside now stack two of them on top of each other to simulate 2.5KW of power draw.  That is a pretty big box (8U = 14" by 19" by 24").  Could you cool that with air?
 How noisy would it be?  We already have a pretty large "rigbox".  Going larger would make it somewhat easier to cool.

Before I get flamed:
I am not saying the rigbox isn't more efficient.  It is.  The same sized box with the same amount of electricity/heat would produce 50 GH/s vs ~7 GH/s (10x 5970s). Still the laws of thermodynamics don't care what (or how much) the 2.5KW produced.  50GH/s on 2.5KW or 7GH/s on 2.5KW is still 2.5KW either way.  

That is an interesting challenge.  In mining the difficulty in cooling 1KW+ heat loads is what has lead to open frame rigs, extenders, extra high rpm fans, etc.  Will be interesting to see how they intend to cool them and how noisy they will be.  Not saying high potential noise is a problem (it isn't as most will be in datacenters or semi-industrial locations).  It just may shock some people who think of FPGA as silent and cool but that is just because nobody has scaled FPGA up to tens of GH/s in a compact space yet.

So BFL come on at least give us some estimated dimensions and db specs.

Is there any information how the mini rig or the rig bix will look like? I am wondering what will be their phisical dimension, are they going to be expandable, etc.

Is there any information how the mini rig or the rig bix will look like? I am wondering what will be their phisical dimension, are they going to be expandable, etc.