python OpenCL bitcoin miner

[m0mchil]

Fixed issue with intermittent solving for duplicate pool job. Anyone using the miner against a pool should upgrade to latest version to avoid losing shares.

Also, kernel now compiles with vectors on Stream 2.1

[bfever]

Everything is running great here except when I play a video my computer crashes.  I'm running a Radeon 6970 and as soon as I click on a video (youtube, etc) etc I get a hard lock.  If I turn off poclbm.exe no problems with the videos.  Has anyone had a similar experience?

I have exactly the same issue as you described: a complete freeze of all Windows (running Vista 64bit), not even ctrl-alt-del working anymore. And I suspect everything from Adobe: not only flash player but even opening a PDF in Acrobat Reader causes my system to freeze.

I had an ATI 4870 before which didn't show this problem.

[alowm]

Thanks for this. Working fine on:

2010 iMac running OSX 10.6.5 with a 256mb HD4850
Python 2.6.1
PyOpenCL 0.92
SVN revision #19 of python-jsonrpc
Commit 7ed72feab9baac99727c4bafaadb8575787ab627 of the miner

Doing 14,000-16,000 khash/sec. The CPU miner on the Core i7 Quad was only doing 1,500 khash/sec per core. 

[Cryptoman]

I'm about to set up m0mchil's miner on openSUSE 11.3, and I have a couple of (hopefully) simple questions.  Can I continue to use my motherboard-integrated Nvidia GPU for display purposes while running an ATI 5XXX card strictly for mining?  I presume I add the ATI driver to the kernel but don't make any changes to X so it continues to use the Nvidia.  Also, can I use the ati-fglrxG02-kmp-desktop driver from the repo at www2.ati.com/suse/11.3/, or do I need to compile from source?  Thanks.

[brocktice]

I'm about to set up m0mchil's miner on openSUSE 11.3, and I have a couple of (hopefully) simple questions.  Can I continue to use my motherboard-integrated Nvidia GPU for display purposes while running an ATI 5XXX card strictly for mining?  I presume I add the ATI driver to the kernel but don't make any changes to X so it continues to use the Nvidia.  Also, can I use the ati-fglrxG02-kmp-desktop driver from the repo at www2.ati.com/suse/11.3/, or do I need to compile from source?  Thanks.

I doubt it, the ATI cards will need X displays on them (even if no physical displays), or they won't work with OpenCL. Stupid, I know. You'd be better off just using one of the ATI cards for display and disabling the on-board card, or if you have the spare slots, add another ATI card just for display.

[Cryptoman]

OK, maybe I will install it as a multiple-monitor setup and just not plug a monitor into the ATI card.  I am still a bit confused about how OpenCL works; I thought the fglrx driver supported it directly.  Is the SDK necessary?

[brocktice]

OK, maybe I will install it as a multiple-monitor setup and just not plug a monitor into the ATI card.  I am still a bit confused about how OpenCL works; I thought the fglrx driver supported it directly.  Is the SDK necessary?

You will need the streaming SDK. I recommend 2.1, although maybe I'm behind the times and 2.2 is supported better now?

[lfm]

OK, maybe I will install it as a multiple-monitor setup and just not plug a monitor into the ATI card.  I am still a bit confused about how OpenCL works; I thought the fglrx driver supported it directly.  Is the SDK necessary?

You will need the streaming SDK. I recommend 2.1, although maybe I'm behind the times and 2.2 is supported better now?

as far as I know 2.2 and 2.3 still dont quite work as well as 2.1 for mining. good luck

[em3rgentOrdr]

Thanks to this OpenCL bitcoin miner, I'm getting 28,000 khash/sec on my Nvidia GF9800GX2, on an Ubuntu 10.10 machine, with an additional 2,000 khash/sec from the regular bitcoin client running on my low-end Core2 Duo.

UPDATE: that 28,000 khash/sec is only using one card (DEVICE 0) of the dual-card GF9800GX2.  The other card (DEVICE 1) currently renders my desktop screen, but when I run DEVICE 1, I get an additional 26,000 khash/sec.  That is a total of ~54,000 khash/sec when both cards of my GF9800GX2 are being used.

UPDATE: I modified a script to invoke this OpenCL miner to run DEVICE 1 upon detection of screen saver: http://asktom.cf/index.php?topic=2636.msg37461#msg37461

[lfm]

Thanks to this OpenCL bitcoin miner, I'm getting 28,000 khash/sec on my Nvidia GF9800GX2, on an Ubuntu 10.10 machine, with an additional 2,000 khash/sec from the regular bitcoin client running on my low-end Core2 Duo.

UPDATE: that 28,000 khash/sec is only using one card (DEVICE 0) of the dual-card GF9800GX2.  The other card (DEVICE 1) currently renders my desktop screen, but when I run DEVICE 1, I get an additional 26,000 khash/sec.  That is a total of ~54,000 khash/sec when both cards of my GF9800GX2 are being used.

UPDATE: I modified a script to invoke this OpenCL miner to run DEVICE 1 upon detection of screen saver: http://asktom.cf/index.php?topic=2636.msg37461#msg37461

I suspect it would be best to set the screensaver to a blank screen also so you dont waste cycles on cute displays

[em3rgentOrdr]

Thanks to this OpenCL bitcoin miner, I'm getting 28,000 khash/sec on my Nvidia GF9800GX2, on an Ubuntu 10.10 machine, with an additional 2,000 khash/sec from the regular bitcoin client running on my low-end Core2 Duo.

UPDATE: that 28,000 khash/sec is only using one card (DEVICE 0) of the dual-card GF9800GX2.  The other card (DEVICE 1) currently renders my desktop screen, but when I run DEVICE 1, I get an additional 26,000 khash/sec.  That is a total of ~54,000 khash/sec when both cards of my GF9800GX2 are being used.

UPDATE: I modified a script to invoke this OpenCL miner to run DEVICE 1 upon detection of screen saver: http://asktom.cf/index.php?topic=2636.msg37461#msg37461

I suspect it would be best to set the screensaver to a blank screen also so you dont waste cycles on cute displays

Good point!  Actually, I've set the screen saver to disply my photo image gallery, so it doesn't consume many GPU cycles. 

[BitLex]

Because 5970 is actually two 5870s with internal crossfire. OpenCL doesn't work with crossfire. It must be switched off. You can't switch it off on Windows. For now, 5970 can be used fully on Linux only.

this is definitely NOT true.
as i posted earlier in this thread running both 5970 GPUs on crossfire-activated windows with poclbm_py2exe_20101126 works (almost) perfect, both cores get their ~300M, both cores find hashes/solve blocks/earn bitcoins.

the only problem remaining is, that poclbm_py2exe_20101126 stops working, or crashes, when slush restarts the pool-server (which isn't a problem when mining on my own), so i always have to keep an eye on the miner to make sure it's still running.
i can't do that 24/7, which is why i currently use 2 miner-versions, poclbm_py2exe_20110104 on my first core, poclbm_py2exe_20101126 on second core, so only one core stops working on a server-restart/-crash.

it would really be cool, if you could check what you changed after 20101126 and this could be solved, so that windows-users aren't limited anymore to a single core (when using latest miner-versions).
until then, every win-user should try my way, to get both dual-gpu-cores mining.

[teknohog]

If anyone is using multiple GPUs on Linux, can you please post some more details?

I tried this the other day (5570 + 5770) and the results were not impressive. Ideally, I wanted to use the weaker card for my main screen, so the other GPU could crunch at a lower FPS. However, anything to increase the hash rate compared to the single 5770 would be nice.

The setup was one X server with two screens, both connected to the same monitor since the Radeons cannot work headless. The problem was that while one GPU was crunching at a low FPS, the other screen was also lagging. In addition, crunching on the other GPU was severely slowed down. I could not get the total hash rate above that of the single 5770.

Is anyone using separate X servers or some other kind of setup? I suspect my system might have some inherent limitations (weak CPU, only 1x PCIe slots), so if other people have working dual-screen setups, I probably won't bother with any other tricks.

[tmr0]

I've had  my HD5770 running for over 2 weeks and have not had anything accepted, I'm getting ~150,000 khash/s.  I am using the following with pyopencl and poclbm:

1. Ubuntu 10.04 amd64
2. ati-driver-installer-10-10-x86.x86_64.run
3. ati-opencl-runtime_2.1_amd64.deb
4. ati-opencl-dev_2.1.deb

Any thoughts on how to go about troubleshooting?

[em3rgentOrdr]

I've had  my HD5770 running for over 2 weeks and have not had anything accepted, I'm getting ~150,000 khash/s.  I am using the following with pyopencl and poclbm:

1. Ubuntu 10.04 amd64
2. ati-driver-installer-10-10-x86.x86_64.run
3. ati-opencl-runtime_2.1_amd64.deb
4. ati-opencl-dev_2.1.deb

Any thoughts on how to go about troubleshooting?

Bitcoin block generation is entirely probabilistic, where each hash attempt is completely independent on others.  According to http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php the probability of time you will have to wait to generate a block are as follows:

Difficulty Factor   16307.4828568
Hash Target   1.65320028405E+63
Hash Rate (khps)   ~150,000

Probability   Time
Average   5 days, 9 hours, 42 minutes
50%   3 days, 17 hours, 54 minutes
95%   16 days, 4 hours, 33 minutes

You will have to wait.

[Raulo]

You will have to wait.

Probably. But I would try to run it on testnet and see if anything gets accepted. On testnet, you should get a block after several minutes. If it works on testnet, it's just a matter of time (and luck) on "realnet".

[ledskof]

Everything is running great here except when I play a video my computer crashes.  I'm running a Radeon 6970 and as soon as I click on a video (youtube, etc) etc I get a hard lock.  If I turn off poclbm.exe no problems with the videos.  Has anyone had a similar experience?

I have exactly the same issue as you described: a complete freeze of all Windows (running Vista 64bit), not even ctrl-alt-del working anymore. And I suspect everything from Adobe: not only flash player but even opening a PDF in Acrobat Reader causes my system to freeze.

I had an ATI 4870 before which didn't show this problem.

Me too.  I have an ATI HD 6970 in a Windows 7 box.  Even at standard clock speeds, if I bring up a youtube video, the screen freezes and I can no longer toggle keyboard lights. iTunes still plays, but I haven't tested network services or anything yet.  Maybe there is some chance I could RDP into it, but I doubt it.

It's really annoying having to remember what not to do, but oh well.  I'm just waiting for the crashing to finally cause a problem with my 4 x SSD RAID 0.

I'm also finding that SDK v2.1 just isn't happening for me.  I removed all ATI related apps, used Driver Sweeper to clean up the remnants, and then went with the 12.10a hotfix + ATI Stream SDK v2.1.  When I run poclbm.exe, it gives the same error message it gives when the Stream SDK isn't installed at all.

I also tried this on a laptop with an ATI HD 5730 in it.  Same thing with poclbm not recognizing the Stream SDK v2.1.  Am I missing some step to get it working?  v2.3 works just fine for me, it's just that I'm assuming in light of people saying to run 2.1, that I would get more performance out of it.  I'm getting 290mhash/s right now by overclocking it to 920mhz.  Any higher seems to just crash it. I was a little too busy to tweak with it right now, so I haven't messed with the the memory clock or voltage much yet.

[teknohog]

v2.3 works just fine for me, it's just that I'm assuming in light of people saying to run 2.1, that I would get more performance out of it.

In my experience, 2.2 is the best. 2.1 used to have compilation problems with vectors, and 2.3 is a little slower (on a HD5770). These things really seem to be different for different setups, so there is no reason to follow an arbitrary rumour. Try them all and see what works best for you.

[Cryptoman]

When switching out the SDK, does one just need to copy in the library files, or does PyOpenCL need to be rebuilt?

[ElectricGoat]

Hi,

I don't have a big expensive graphic card, but I wanted to try anyway. For the record, I have a Radeon HD 5450, and I get a little below 11 Mhash/s with the default settings, plus maybe 2 Mhash/s with the i3 CPU (3.7 MHash/s with the CPU only). So, of course, it's not very impressive, and probably not worth mining with.