What else can our FPGA mining boards be used for? - page 2.

gyverlb

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Quote from: Dexter770221 on June 18, 2012, 10:57:09 AM

WebPack ISE do not support LX150 but you can download 30day tial that supports all parts. And according to Xillinx documents synthesis and PAR requires little above 3GB of RAM for LX150. Higher end Virtexes requires more.

4GB may not be enough, see :

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=44891.msg619585;topicseen#msg619585

I think I saw another post saying pretty much the same thing but can't find it again.

If your build takes 24hours, you'd certainly want to benefit from several processor cores and more memory to test several designs. I'm the kind of guy who prefers interpreted language because testing the code is faster... Waiting 24 hours is kind of frustrating, so I'd definitely want to test several designs in parallel if I can.

luffy

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i guess they can be sold solely for the FPGAs if some company (or individual) can reap 'em off the board and use them elsewhere Wink

Dexter770221

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WebPack ISE do not support LX150 but you can download 30day tial that supports all parts. And according to Xillinx documents synthesis and PAR requires little above 3GB of RAM for LX150. Higher end Virtexes requires more.

gyverlb

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Quote from: mrb on June 18, 2012, 01:18:00 AM

Quote from: gyverlb on June 18, 2012, 12:54:11 AM

From what I read and could collect by looking for information, you need to pay several hundred (thousand?) dollars to get the Xilinx tools and the bitcoin miner bitstreams seems to need 10s of gigabytes or RAM to build. I don't know about others but my hobbies usually start smaller than that...

Xilinx ISE has a free version available. And if you can afford a $400 FPGA board, you can surely spend $80 for 16GB RAM...

The free version (ISE Webpack tool if I'm not mistaken) doesn't seem to support the Spartan used in miner boards (at least not according to Wikipedia, and I'm not downloading a ~6GB tar.gz just to verify this), I don't have any computer available that would support 16GB RAM (one of my rig could, but it's kind of used for other things...). So the barrier to entry isn't that low : just to begin hacking I'd have to purchase a new computer and a development board with a supported FPGA instead of trying my hand on a Cairnsmore1 or ztex.

And the subject is about FPGA mining boards, not the FPGAs the free ISE supports : what good is the free ISE if it doesn't work for mining boards ?

It's kind of unrelated to the subject because its a matter of taste but I'm very reluctant to use a proprietary development platform too. I don't know of any free complete toolchain and I don't feel like beginning working on something like this with no free alternative.

rjk

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1ngldh

Quote from: kano on June 18, 2012, 09:16:48 AM

Hmm well when my daughter's iPhone was carrier locked I simply unlocked it visiting a web site ... took a few seconds.
So I guess we can find a 24/7 job for one FPGA device doing this for everyone on the planet.
What about the other thousands of FPGAs ...

Pen testing is big business, and cracking passwords in real time without having to spend a week on an expensive GPU cluster is attractive.

kano

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Quote from: 2112 on June 18, 2012, 08:11:33 AM

Quote from: kano on June 18, 2012, 05:44:16 AM

Yeah I see this often around here and other places on the net ... "Password Cracker"
But seriously why? What use is there to this except hacking into other stuff you aren't supposed to be hacking into?

Please read mrb's blog. He has an example of using password cracker to liberate the cell phones that are carrier-locked or SIM-locked. So it has both freedom angle and financial angle.

http://blog.zorinaq.com/

Hmm well when my daughter's iPhone was carrier locked I simply unlocked it visiting a web site ... took a few seconds.
So I guess we can find a 24/7 job for one FPGA device doing this for everyone on the planet.
What about the other thousands of FPGAs ...

2112

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Quote from: kano on June 18, 2012, 05:44:16 AM

Yeah I see this often around here and other places on the net ... "Password Cracker"
But seriously why? What use is there to this except hacking into other stuff you aren't supposed to be hacking into?

Please read mrb's blog. He has an example of using password cracker to liberate the cell phones that are carrier-locked or SIM-locked. So it has both freedom angle and financial angle.

http://blog.zorinaq.com/

interlagos

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Quote from: ShadesOfMarble on June 17, 2012, 04:55:58 PM

What else can our FPGA mining boards be used for?

Mining Litecoins?

* interlagos puts on anti-flame helmet and runs away *

kokjo

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You are WRONG!

Quote from: kano on June 18, 2012, 05:44:16 AM

I'm actually repeating the OP but ...

Yeah I see this often around here and other places on the net ... "Password Cracker"
But seriously why? What use is there to this except hacking into other stuff you aren't supposed to be hacking into?
... and by use I mean something that you would do night and day and pay $600 for a device to do it.
i.e. like BTC mining where there is a financial return.
Password Cracking seems like a complete and total waste of time IMO

yes, but....? he asked what it was useful for. i just gave examples.

kano

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I'm actually repeating the OP but ...

Yeah I see this often around here and other places on the net ... "Password Cracker"
But seriously why? What use is there to this except hacking into other stuff you aren't supposed to be hacking into?
... and by use I mean something that you would do night and day and pay $600 for a device to do it.
i.e. like BTC mining where there is a financial return.
Password Cracking seems like a complete and total waste of time IMO

ice_chill

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Quote from: kokjo on June 18, 2012, 04:20:11 AM

FPGA are good for "number" crunching. and can be highly optimized to perform certain tasks.

mining boards lack IO that means that you can't make I/O heavy operations with it(ram, harddisk, network, ...).
mining boards are only good for computations, you could use it as a signing device for ecdsa or rsa, or make it a password cracker.

MiniRig as a password cracker would be quite good

so long at it matches the performance of 50 x HD7970s as it does with mining.

kokjo

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You are WRONG!

FPGA are good for "number" crunching. and can be highly optimized to perform certain tasks.

mining boards lack IO that means that you can't make I/O heavy operations with it(ram, harddisk, network, ...).
mining boards are only good for computations, you could use it as a signing device for ecdsa or rsa, or make it a password cracker.

Dexter770221

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FPGA's can do many things. They are programmable devices. You can for example made an "inteligent home" controler. Only obstacle in purely mining boards is lack of I/Os. But if you choose wisely there are boards with reasonable amount of I/Os. Then only you imagination will be limation factor.

ShadesOfMarble

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Quote from: Gladamas on June 18, 2012, 01:00:12 AM

FPGAs are classical computers. They can be simplified to a Turing machine and thus cannot run quantum calculations.

You are completely wrong.
1) I was not even talking about quantum computing. I was talking about quantum monte carlo, which is nothing more than solving some kind of equations.
2) You actually CAN run quantum algorithms on a "classical computer". You usually just don't want to do it because this requires an immense ammount of resources. E.g. you need to track the state of the system in every time step, which means you need TB of RAM even for small systems... If you run a quantum algorithm on a quantum computer that's not needed, because quantum physics already does that for you. But that's not even why quantum computers are faster than classical computers. They are because they can compute all solutions of a problem AT ONCE (ok, that's a bit simplified), u just have to pick the right solution.

mrb

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Quote from: gyverlb on June 18, 2012, 12:54:11 AM

From what I read and could collect by looking for information, you need to pay several hundred (thousand?) dollars to get the Xilinx tools and the bitcoin miner bitstreams seems to need 10s of gigabytes or RAM to build. I don't know about others but my hobbies usually start smaller than that...

Xilinx ISE has a free version available. And if you can afford a $400 FPGA board, you can surely spend $80 for 16GB RAM...

Gladamas

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Bitcoin today is what the internet was in 1998.

FPGAs are classical computers. They can be simplified to a Turing machine and thus cannot run quantum calculations.

gyverlb

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Quote from: mrb on June 17, 2012, 10:13:01 PM

gyverlb: the tools are not out of reach to the hobbyist. As a matter of fact, the first FPGA bitstreams (plural) for Bitcoin mining have all been developed by hobbyists on these very forums.

From what I read and could collect by looking for information, you need to pay several hundred (thousand?) dollars to get the Xilinx tools and the bitcoin miner bitstreams seems to need 10s of gigabytes or RAM to build. I don't know about others but my hobbies usually start smaller than that...

1l1l11ll1l

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I plan on converting my BFL singles into ASICs

mrb

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gyverlb: the tools are not out of reach to the hobbyist. As a matter of fact, the first FPGA bitstreams (plural) for Bitcoin mining have all been developed by hobbyists on these very forums.

gyverlb

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I'm not worried about what you can do with FPGAs (the fact that Bitcoin miner boards don't have RAM would be a problem for some kinds of work though), the problem is that the tools to build a bitstream seem quite costly and out of reach for any hobbyist.

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