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The guys at NiceHash have released a beta version of their own easy-to-use best-profit auto-switching application called NiceHash Miner. The software detects what crypto mining capable hardware you have in your systems (for now supports only Nvidia GPUs and CPU mining), checks your hashrate and automatically switches to the most profitable algorithm available to give you the best profit for your hashrate. All you have to do is download and run the miner, choose the server location and enter your Bitcoin wallet address where you want to get your coins sent at and you are almost ready to start mining and maximizing your profit. As a backend the NiceHash Miner relies on the cpuminer-multi form tpruvot for CPU mining and to the ccminer forks from tpruvot and sp for the Nvidia GPU mining.
The first time you run the NiceHash Miner software you will need to go through the Benchmark mode in order for the software to determine what your mining hashrate will provide in terms of hashrate for the different supported algorithm. Then you are ready to start mining with all or only a few of the mining capable CPUs/GPUs you have available – you can choose what you want to mine with. There is however still no support for you to chose only some of the supported algorithm, so you are stuck with all of the available in the software. We are probably soon also going to see an OpenCL miner such as sgminer integrated to add support for AMD GPUs as well, but for now if you have AMD GPUs you can still rely on the Miner Control Tool for example for automatic profit switching at NiceHash/Westhash. Their own tool does look promising and works pretty well, but it needs more work and features, also do not forget that it is still in beta. Still you might want to give it a try though…
– To download and try the latest NiceHash Miner beta software (binary releases)…
The developer of the Ethminer fork with Nvidia CUDA support (source) Genoil has released another update and we have compiled a new Windows binary of ethminer with CUDA support. Do note that this Windows binary release is compiled with VS2013 for windows 64-bit and is for CUDA 6.5. The latest version comes with some optimizations and a new command line option cuda-schedule to experiment with that replaces the old cuda-turbo, also note that you may need to manually specify the number of GPUs to use if you have multiple video cards using the cuda-devices command line parameter if the miner fires only on one device by default. Additionally to get better performance you can try adding the following command line parameters to the ethminer:
For OpenCL:
--cl-global-work 16384
For CUDA:--cuda-grid-size 8192 --cuda-block-size 128 --cuda-schedule auto
--cuda-scheduleSet the schedule mode for CUDA threads waiting for CUDA devices to finish work. Default is sync. Possible values for mode are:
auto– Uses a heuristic based on the number of active CUDA contexts in the process C and the number of logical processors in the system P. If C > P, then yield else spin.
spin– Instruct CUDA to actively spin when waiting for results from the device.
yield– Instruct CUDA to yield its thread when waiting for results from the device.
sync– Instruct CUDA to block the CPU thread on a synchronization primitive when waiting for the results from the device.
It seems that the auto mode for cuda-schedule works best for us providing maybe a bit lower maximum hashrate, but a more stable one than the sync that may produce higher maxes, but also lower. You are free to experiment what will work best on your mining configuration however. The Ethminer CUDA fork should work on Compute 2.0 or newer GPUs, but the performance on older GPUs can be worse, also don’t forget that you can run Ethminer in OpenCL mode as well on Nvidia-based video cards and not only on AMD if you are having trouble with the CUDA support or the hashrate you get is lower as compared to OpenCL.
– Download the updated Ethminer CUDA fork compiled for Windows and ready to be used…
First Open Source Ethereum Mining Pool Released
9, Sep 2015
Etherchain have released an open source implementation of pooled mining for Ethereum. Do note however that this software is not a complete mining pool as it only takes care of work distribution and share validation; valid shares are stored into a local database (LevelDB). Reward calculation and payments are not yet implemented, but it should be possible to integrate this software some of the existing open source mining pools. The current implementation is in Go and it might not be the most effective one, apparently the pool is able to process ~600 workers at 30% CPU utilization (1 core) and 70MB RAM usage. The pool has been tested successfully with both the go Ethereum client (geth) and the cpp Ethereum client (eth) as a backend. And while it may not be a complete implementation with full functionality and web-based interface it is still a good starting point for anyone interested in running a mining pool for Ethereum without having to start from scratch.
– For more information about the first open source Ethereum mining pool and the source code…