[tech] Possible Club Purchase Idea: GPU heavy calculations box

[Luke Williams]

On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 11:32 AM, Nick Bannon <nick at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au> wrote:
> Sounds fun, I'll donate, too.

Me too!

> It's getting progressively harder to mine/verify, right? Anyone here
> done any recently?

Some people have reportedly managed to get ~1700Mhash/s out of a setup
with 2x6990 GPUs. If we really wanted to go all out, we could get four
of these cards in a machine and (optimistically) achieve 3.4Ghash/s.
At the current difficulty level for generation and the current reward
level for generating a block we could expect to earn (by `time =
difficulty * 2**32 / hashrate`) roughly 2.2 bitcoins a day, equivalent
to about $25 at the present (volatile) exchange rate.

I don't think profit should be taken to be the primary motive for
buying the machine - but it's certainly something useful for it to do
while there are no other jobs for it. I've drafted a spec by taking
some of the best parts I could find on Austin's website (so the
prices/availability might not be the best):

https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AoZGh3sG7AokdExrb2lOWk1lX2pBMHNtRjJnM2c4Z1E&hl=en_US

I encourage anyone with hardware savvy to alter the list if you see
any way of improving the value for money!

On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 11:16 AM, Daniel Axtens <danielax at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The plan would be to lock it in the MR, away from gamers.

Good plan. This would be easy once it has some of the responsibilities
of a server.

Cheers,
Luke


On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 11:32 AM, Nick Bannon <nick at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 11:16:56AM +0800, Daniel Axtens wrote:
>> A few people tossed around the idea of getting a multiple-GPU box
>> to do Maths(TM). Suggested projects included Cameron Hall 3D (CH3D),
>> Bitcoin mining (possible source of club income: although, are they worth
>> anything any more?), and generally other cool stuff.
> [...]
>
> Sounds fun, I'll donate, too.
>
> It's getting progressively harder to mine/verify, right? Anyone here
> done any recently?
>
>> The plan would be to lock it in the MR, away from gamers.
>
> Even if thats not the primary goal, it'd be nice to hook one of those GPUs
> to a clubroom-visible GDU on occasion, maybe it could show walkthroughs of CH3D.
>
> Nick.
>
> --
>   Nick Bannon   | "I made this letter longer than usual because
> nick-sig at rcpt.to | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal
>