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Interesting, I have access to a university cluster (in the top 100 of the top500) and I had played with the idea of using it in a similar way. I didn't actually
by waiquoo 13y ago
Interesting, I have access to a university cluster (in the top 100 of the top500) and I had played with the idea of using it in a similar way. I didn't actually implement it because I need to maintain good terms with the IT dept for my research (and everything else really). Does anyone know how this would scale or at what point (in terms of number of cores/memory) it would be a worthwhile?
- schmichael 13y agoNo. Just don't. These computers are not your property. Do not use them for personal financial gain (unless it's somehow directly related to your studies). You will cost your university far more in electricity than you'll make from Bitcoins. This is stealing.
- waiquoo 13y agoI don't plan on it, haha. I was more curious. Besides if I got banned from the cluster I would have to drop out of my program.
- maxerickson 13y agoWhat do you mean by worthwhile? For bitcoin, you won't manage to pay for the electricity using anything general purpose, so it won't be worthwhile at any scale. I don't know the particulars, but CPU mining of scrypt coins is at least not very profitable.
- waiquoo 13y agoI realized that worthwhile is a vague term when I wrote it. I would say that making $2.35 over 4 days is not worthwhile, but maybe $20/day (beer money) would be reasonable (considering I would not be paying for electricity). More to the point would be a rate (dollars/cpu/day) where you could calculate what the total take would be from running under different conditions. However, I realize that with the dynamic nature of bitcoins and the variety of hardware available that rate could vary quite a bit. disclaimer This information is for educational purposes only, I want to keep my job.
- maxerickson 13y agoI am also curious about these things. It looks like you can take in ~$0.30 a day mining litecoin on a 'decent modern cpu' (meaning a high end i5). Some Xeon monstrosity gets you up towards $1. The best GPUs are more like $10 a day. There might be somewhat better scrypt coins, but I guess more and more people are watching this (so they will have roughly even mining activity). Bitcoin will be far less (because a few thousand dollars of ASICs is good for thousands of GPUs or tens/hundreds of thousands of CPUs).
- masmullin 13y agoAsk permission to use the resources as part of a research paper. Be very explicit to what you are doing, how long you are doing it for, and donate the profits back to the school or charity.