Category: cryptocurrency

Akroma Mining with Tesla K40

Following on from my post about mining ZCash I decided to mine some Akroma coin, I like the look of the project as it has some nice features and who knows. Maybe it will take off! I don’t have a lot of mining hardware, but I have a test system for messing about with this stuff. I do mining more for interest, and I buy some coins for investments. Which are doing ok.

I downloaded the miner from here, it is a version that has the dev fee, but I am fine with that as making software is hard work. You need to get a wallet, I chose the web wallet as that seems like a reasonable option at the minute. In general I prefer stand alone wallets but this is fine until there is a better option for Akroma.

I am running the miner in eth only mode on Ubuntu Linux using the following command:


./ethdcrminer64 -epool stratum+tcp://geo.pool.akroma.eu:8001 -ewal YOURWALLETADDRESS -eworker workerx -epsw x -asm 1 -allpools 1 -di 1

On the K40 I get about 11.6 Mh/s, which is slightly less than I get with a K20 (12.14 Mh/s). No idea why that might be, it could be differences with the Cuda install perhaps. I think the system with the K20 is more up-to-date. If I leave both systems running I will get about 7-8 coins in 24hrs, I will probably only run them together for a day or so and the leave one going for about 4 coins a day.

I will leave this mining for a while, generate some coins and then perhaps go back to ZCash, or try something new! I would like to build a small rig, I have an old system that could have about 3 GPUs in it. That might be the place to start, it would be cool to get one of those multi-gpu cases that could have about 4 GPUs in.

ZCash Mining With Nvidia Telsa

I have two Nvidia Telsa cards that I use for work, they are good for certain tasks around data mining and machine learning, and I have been interested in trying to use them for Zcash mining. I have a Antminer U3 that mines Bitcoins (slowly, and not that well sometimes), however I fancied a go at mining Zcash too. How hard could it be? Harder than it should have been.

Being Cuda cards I would obviously need a cuda enabled miner to use them. I already mine with Antpool, and they allow users to mine Zcash so that bit was easy. What wasn’t easy was trying to get a miner to compile. I tried nheqminer, that wouldn’t compile and also the newest version doesn’t work with the tesla cards I have as they are not compute 5. The older versions wouldn’t compile either. I also had a few problems with getting cuda running on Kubuntu 16.04 as I needed to upgrade the nvidia drivers which was a pain!

Solution

I got there in the end as I found a binary of nanopool’s ewbf-miner that works with cuda cards! This works great, I get about 70 Sol/s on the K20 and 95Sol/s on the K40. So that is pretty good, you would get about 40 Sol/s on a i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz. I am sure that with a newer telsa or CPU you would get more. This only an experiment however, not a mining operation so I am happy.