Posts Tagged ‘sgminer’

New sgminer 5.1.0 fork with Optimized Lyra2RE Kernel

11, May 2015

sgminer-5-1-0-lyra2re-pallas

Back in February we’ve mentioned about a crowdfunding project for a new optimized Lyra2RE optimized kernel by a used called pallas on the Bitcointalk forum. Now the source code of the optimized kernel, along with the sgminer fork, has been released by pallas and we have compiled a windows binary of the miner for everyone that is interested in trying it out on Windows. Our quick test has shown about 640 KHS hashrate mining Lyra2RE with the compiled binary and the optimized kernel on a non-overclocked Radeon R9 285 GPU (with slight factory OC of the card) by increasing a bit the intensity from the default 15. The result was achieved using the AMD 15.4 Beta driver, though you might want to use the latest official 14.12 release for better performance. You are welcome to experiment and report what hashrate you are getting with this sgminer fork and optimized kernel on your GPU. Do note that this fork of sgminer only comes with kernels supporting Lyra2RE, therefore it is not intended for mining with other algorithms.

– To download and try the sgminer 5.1.0 with optimized Lyra2RE kernel for Windows OS…

New sgminer 5.1.0 fork with Yescrypt Support Available

2, May 2015

sgminer-5-1-0-yescrypt

You can now mine GlobalBoost-Y (BSTY) with AMD-based video cards thanks to a new fork of sgminer 5.1.0 from djm34 that adds support for Yescrypt (source) and we have compiled a windows binary that will allow you to try it out. The windows binary is compiled for x86, so it should work on wider range of systems using 32-bit or 64-bit Windows. Do note that Yescrypt GPU mining is still in early stage, so it might be a bit buggy initially and further optimizations in performance should be possible as this is a preliminary work to port the algorithm to GPU support. The coin does seem to handle well high intensity, so you should start low with 9 for example, also lower worker size such as 16 and 512 threads could be a good start. We are seeing a performance of about 700 hashes per second on a non-overclocked AMD Radeon R9 280X GPU with the settings above, but you are welcome to experiment. Do note that there is still more to be desired from the GPU miner as it is not faster than mining Yescrypt with an up to date CPU, for example a single Intel Core i7 5820K CPU achieves around 5.1 KHS mining GlobalBoost-Y (BSTY).

Update: There is now a slightly faster yescrypt kernel available that allows you to get some extra speed, we got to almost 800 Hashes per second with it, you can download the updated version from the link below. Also the latest version includes yescrypt-multi algorithm for Nvidia Maxwell GPUs (Compute 5.0 or newer) that may provide faster performance than the ccMiner release according to the author, though in our case ccMiner was still faster.

– To download and try the sgminer 5.1.0 Yescrypt GPU miner for Windows OS…

How to Effectively Mine on Multipe Vardiff Pools

26, Feb 2015

cgminer-pool-management-strategy

If you have a not so powerful mining rig or and ASIC and you want to be able to effectively mine on multiple pools that use variable difficulty instead of a fixed one it might be a bit of an issue. Usually on vardiff pools you start with a lower difficulty that might be right for the hashrate of your mining hardware, but the pool starts to increase the difficulty over time making it hard for your miner to keep up to its maximum performance, especially if using multipool that switches coins or solves blocks quickly. CGminer and the other alternative mining software products do come with strategies for effectively utilizing multipool scenarios, you just make sure you use the right one depending on your situation. By default the multipool strategy used by the mining software is set to failover, meaning that if the first pool stops responding the miner will move on the next one in the list until the higher priority pool is back online.

Obviously the above default scenario does not work for vardiff pools to keep your miner at the recommended lower difficulty level, so you need to use one of the different strategies in order to be able to do that. The right strategy for using multiple vardiff pools is the rotate strategy where the miner will automatically switch between the list of pools based on a user set time interval. So checking what time it requires for the pool to switch from the initial difficulty of lets say 128 to 256 and then to move to 512 will give you an idea on how many minutes you need to set for the rotate rounds. 128 and 256 difficulty is OK for Bitcoin ASIC miners that are in the range of 150-200 GHS for example, so setting lets say 5 minutes for the rotation interval should prevent the pool to go higher than 256 difficulty. What the miner will do is move to the next vardiff pool in the list for 5 minutes and then get back to the first pool for 5 more minutes and so on, keeping a difficulty of 128-256 on both pools. This is a great strategy for using with NieHash and WestHash for selling your SHA256 hashrate for example if you have a not so powerful ASIC miner.

Changing the multipool strategies is possible from within the already running cgminer or another miner forked from it or with support for the same options, but this will not be permanent – it will function until the restart of the miner. You can also set the rotate mode to be activated with a startup parameter of the miner by adding this to the command line --rotate 5, the example is for 5 minute rotation between the list of pools.


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