Topic: What else can our FPGA mining boards be used for? (Read 7094 times)

Please share link.

I think this is beyond the skill level of most miners.

Compiling FPGA bitstream is serious business ... takes 48 hours and needs huge resources.

I don't have the skill but with GPU it would be EASY. Not so easy with FPGA.

I am not FPGA expert but neither are the rest of the miners I would say ...

Don't tell me what to do with my FPGA after BFL no longer produce them !

(pretty fucking pathetic....mostly on your part, as seen here first: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.979901 )

Lets create out own FPGA reuse suite, and once BFL are no longer producing FPGA, we sell them on for even more than they cost us

I don't know that cloudcrack uses FPGAs, but there were a couple guys at Defcon last year doing WPA cracking on Spartan3-based boards plugged into their laptops.  I'll try to dig up a link; I'm almost positive the bitstreams were based on the OpenCores sources I linked.

My point is that you *could* run a cracking service using FPGA hardware repurposed from mining, and people *are* willing to pay for such a service.

Moxie, the guy behind cloudcracker.com, uses Amazon EC2 GPU instances, which are very expensive, which explains why his prices are so high. A competitor using FPGAs could significantly undercut him.

Ignoring FPGAs, AMD GPUs are probably the best for this type of application, for the same reason that they are faster per $, compared to Nvidia, for ALU-bound workloads like pw cracking or Bitcoin mining.

A very popular GPU pw cracking tool is oclhashcat, which has excellent support for AMD GPUs. bulanula doesn't know what he is talking about 

What evidence do you have they are using FPGAs ?

Most services that are doing this are using Nvidia GPUs simply because the FPGAs / AMD GPUs driver support is not mature enough and "misses" passwords.

CUDA is best for these applications.

FPGAs way less powerful than the Spartan6 (which all the mining boards except BFL use) have been used for password recovery on .zip files, wifi password cracking, Bluetooth cracking, etc.  Code here:

http://openciphers.sourceforge.net/oc/index.php

Service that charges for this:

https://www.cloudcracker.com/

...an enterprising miner could launch their own.

Well, I've had good luck with Citrix XenServer, and Intel has a hypervisor that I've been wanting to try. I've only needed to reboot the hosts that I run for upgrades, which really have been optional and not needed ("But we have to run the latest stuff for security! blah blah blah....")

So I guess I'll find out how well I can pull it off. If all else fails, I'll have some hardware that someone would probably want to buy. Parts list: http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=19183865
Box wasn't intended to run ISE, but I might install it and compile a few designs just for fun.

I tried to work like that for a while. I've found out that it isn't a workable solution for me and many other developers:

1) need to reboot the host too frequently for various reasons like hung USB driver/device, video driver up-/down-grades, global resource reconfiguration, etc.

2) accurate timekeeping problems in the guests;

3) network virtualization problems/bugs;

4) software performance debugging/troubleshooting became next to impossible.

5) things like plain-old midrange-desktop CQ6600 with 6 SATA drives in matrix RAID outperforms almost-top-of-the line Dell+Vmware server with 12 SAS + 2 SSD drives by more than an order of magnitude. I (and my co-workers) just don't have time to troubleshoot that.

The current software quality of the virtualization solutions for x86 is likely even going backwards. It is completely unlike that of IBM where many low-level hardware tests are virtualizable.

But I honestly bid you good luck, no irony. My current experience is that virtualization in the office setting is good only for the QA departments.

My next planned build is going to have 64GB of RAM to start with, to be upgraded in the future, and will have a virtualization platform of some kind so that I can avoid having multiple machines. The plan is to run the high-cpu and high-memory stuff in a VM with 40GB of RAM and several processor cores, and use the remainder for my daily desktop needs.

Well, at least that's no problem... I have multiple systems with i5 or i7 CPUs and 4-8 GB RAM (can be upgraded to 32 GB and no, those are not my mining rigs). Also loads of SSDs.

The way I see it now, at least for computations/number crunching, the missing RAM could be critical? And there is probably no way working around missing RAM, is it?

What's the point of your post? Install the ISE and implement one of the open source LX150 designs.

For the people who actually like to read with understanding I have one more recommendation: have a dedicated ISE machine. The full implementation runs for LX150 take in the order of one to two days. It is worthwhile to not use your normal workstation for such lenghty jobs in case you'll discover you need to run some maintenance tasks that may require reboot or other systemwide changes.

There are reuse scenarios that I did't address : you can install another bitstream prepared by someone with the tools and know-how or you can sell the board.

Here's the scenario. You paid $600 for a board, connected it to one of your system to mine. Bitcoin mining isn't profitable and you want to hack your own boards as a hobby (or for profit, who knows ?).

The question is how can you use your $600 board ?

Here are the question you have to ask yourself : do you want to invest in a ISE license to use ISE more than 30 days ?
Here are the ones you *may* have to ask yourself :
- do you need 16GB RAM or more to do what you want with the board and ISE... apparently serious hackers do, but will you, do you know anyone that did hack the boards with ISE running on a 4GB laptop and wasn't frustrated ?
- if positive, do you already have a system lying around that support such an amount (I don't if I don't count the mining rig in the basement which would probably be sold long before I ask myself this kind of question) ? Are you prepared to upgrade your existing desktop if you have one or build one if you use a thin laptop like me (thin laptops don't support 16+ GB RAM...) ?

In the end, using your board for playing around could be quite costly and given that they don't have any RAM, you won't even be able to tinker with any algorithm needing any meaningful amount of local memory to work.

All these unknowns, costs and limitations make me believe that it would probably be frustrating to try hacking these boards as a hobbyist (not that I wouldn't like to try myself, I'd love to see a free toolchain that doesn't need humongous amount of RAM).

If system at startup consumes 1GB then of course at some point it will cause HDD to heart attack I have old laptop with 4GB and 32 bit XP (It sees only 3.75GB) And I never saw a "swapping storm" as you called.

4GB wont be good enough. You will get into a swapping storm with almost no CPU use and 100% disk wait. I made that mistake by installing ISE on a 4GB laptop that cannot be upgraded beyond that.

8GB laptop works just fine with total memory usage in the 5-6GB range and at least one core is 100% occupied most of the time.

if you want to use your fpga for other things, you must make your own code and compile it.
to compile fpga code, alot of memory is required. so, if you want to use your fpga for other things you must have alot of ram.

Sorry but what does system memory have to do with FPGA reuse ?

I mean for $100 you can have 16GB RAM, or for $240 you can have 32GB RAM in an almost budget motherboard with budget CPU.

And I see 3700MB peak for 64 bit sytem. So 4GB should be good. Propably in amateur designs you will never see that amount occupied. Besides it's always a virtual memory Fast SSD reqiured though. ISE do not support pararelism so more cores don't help. But virtual machines and ISE on each one is of course possible...

I know kano is trolling here but it is worth further comment.

The grey market is has literally truckloads of cell phones and cellular modems that can be purchased for just slightly above scrap value. They are always not-so-recent generation and frequently have branding and logos that are obsolete.

This type of business requires factory-style work arrangements, not a customer accessible web site. The unlocking needs to be done before the end-user sale.

You can do it yourself. With a liitle skills and cheap equipment (200$).