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The Heisinger Foundation
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Can anybody repurpose bitcoin miners for WCGrid research?

I have about $25,000 in bitcoin miners, which are basically high powered graphics cards. These are in most cases FPGAs or ASIC based. Currently Bitcoin miners have been hit with various legislation and excessive government compliance requirements, many cannot even be legally operated inside the USA. I'm looking for a driver or some way to reprogram/repurpose these specific-use machines to operate with BOINC and the WCGrid. The opportunity is immense because many of these machines have been rendered obsolete by new technology, but I have heard they can be used for medical imaging, etc. This is at least what one miner company (Butterfly Labs) has said. Any ideas?
[Sep 3, 2013 9:47:17 PM]   Link   Report threatening or abusive post: please login first  Go to top 
Sgt.Joe
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Re: Can anybody repurpose bitcoin miners for WCGrid research?

The question would be "Is any of this hardware compatible with Open CL code ?" If not, the answer is probably "No, it can not be repurposed." This question needs someone with much more knowledge than I have.
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Sgt. Joe
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B2I
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Re: Can anybody repurpose bitcoin miners for WCGrid research?

I hate to see high-powered hardware like this go to waste, but I'm in the same boat with Sgt Joe. I just don't know enough about Field Programmable Gate Arrays to know if they can be made compatible with current WGC projects. I do know enough about them to understand the tremendous power they hold. When HCC put out GPU compatible work units, we saw a 10 fold increase in points per day per watt; FPGAs could make that seem like nothing. If I understand it correctly, companies like Avalon, http://launch.avalon-asics.com/#features, build single purpose silicon chips to do one thing, mine bit coins. If there were enough demand, they could build the chip for a specific WCG project. Seems a single, small, low wattage device could outdo dozens of high end GPUs. But alas, it would have to be custom made for that project.

Funny how every thing old is new again. One of the first machines that could be called a computer -- ENIAC http://inventors.about.com/od/estartinventions/a/Eniac.htm
Was a special purpose bank of 20,000 vacuum tubes built to do one thing, calculate artillery tables for the US Army. This is very similar the form and function of FPGS today.

If and of you alpha geeks can think of a way to repurpose this hardware to WCG projects, please chime in.
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[Sep 4, 2013 2:02:48 AM]   Link   Report threatening or abusive post: please login first  Go to top 
Coleslaw
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Re: Can anybody repurpose bitcoin miners for WCGrid research?

I think you will also find that WCG isn't good at being the test bed for new technologies. It took many years to get its first GPU app which finished rather quickly. Then, we had a fully working ARM client (non Berkeley) available for a year before we got ARM capabilities here. And that took Berkeley getting around to finally taking it serious (which WCG helped get testers for). I think FPGA's are an awesome idea IF we can find someone that could code for them. However, my limited knowledge of them is that they aren't as easy to code for as GPU's. SETI had discussions on FPGA's back in 2008 and seemed to come to that conclusion. http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=47825#774054

I did find this website intriguing. http://www.fpgaathome.org/tag/boinc/

Since Bitcoin was so popular and that the equipment is getting outdated even more quickly every day, these FPGA's will probably spring up more and more giving a lot more people reason to experiment. You may even try offering access to or donating some of your equipment for any projects willing to give it a shot at coding.
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[Edit 1 times, last edit by Coleslaw at Sep 4, 2013 2:51:25 AM]
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Re: Can anybody repurpose bitcoin miners for WCGrid research?

I think FPGA's are an awesome idea IF we can find someone that could code for them.


Altera has adopted OpenCL so the compiler should be able to do most of the work.. at least for those devices of course:) Cool stuff..

http://www.altera.com/products/software/opencl/opencl-index.html
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B2I
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Re: Can anybody repurpose bitcoin miners for WCGrid research?

I think the only way we could utilize FPGAs is for one of the scientists to have their project coded for an FPGA, make the code public or at least available to the FPGA vendors. Then, we crunchers could buy the chip or complete board, have it flashed, and put it to work. An unlikely scenario because the scientests would be out a lot of $s up front with no gaurentee there would be enough dedicated crunchers buy and run the system to make it all worth while. Maybe a computer science major somewhere could take it on as a project..... humm...colaborate with a new or existing project lead..... Berkely?
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Former Member
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Re: Can anybody repurpose bitcoin miners for WCGrid research?

OpenCL is supposed to be portable though. One "should" be able to JIT compile any kernel to run on their machine. Sounds a little intrusive in a distributed grid environment, but could be of value in a lab environment. How it works with BOINC task distribution is probably a whole other headache:)
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The Heisinger Foundation
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Re: Can anybody repurpose bitcoin miners for WCGrid research?

It appears to be ready for open CL! https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BFGMiner
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The Heisinger Foundation
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Re: Can anybody repurpose bitcoin miners for WCGrid research?

My foundation would probably be able to support development if WCGrid has it arms full. I guess talking to berkley or a comp major there would be the way to go.
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[Edit 1 times, last edit by The Heisinger Foundation at Sep 4, 2013 4:35:56 PM]
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The Heisinger Foundation
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Re: Can anybody repurpose bitcoin miners for WCGrid research?

I see some of these miners are OpenCL. Does that mean Altera can customize a driver?
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