Winter is
Coming Ethereum Miner
Aquila Systems, November 2021
The Winter is Coming (WIC) Miner is an Ethereum
cryto-currency miner that uniquely is designed to run on
Intel/AMD based server type computer systems.
It does not require any GPU/Graphics Card unlike most Ethereum
Crypto miners that require a modern high end graphics card.
All Crypto mining provides two products crypto-currency and
heat. In most cases the crypto-currency
is collected and eventually totals a non-trivial
asset. However the heat properly used
especially during the Winter can be another valuable and
necessary product if used effectively. To read more
on this and for useful suggestions see the Crypto Heat
Page
We targeted server type computers for five key reasons:
- Most
servers have multiple memory controllers typically
4-16, which provide a much higher bandwidth to a large
randomly accessed working memory as is required to solve the
Ethereum Hash.
- Most
modern servers have a large number of processing cores that
are usually more power efficient than desktop CPU
cores. These facts allow for fast and
efficient aggregate processing.
- Server
type systems are electronically designed to run full out
365x24. This is not the case with modern
graphics cards and desktop PC’s that have electronic
components that will degrade and ultimately fail (sometimes
after just months) mostly due to high heat and component
quality if run full out continuously.
- Many
servers are powered up all the time using some
power. The WIC Miner will increase the
power usage but in exchange provide crypto currency
offseting the additional power cost and providing useful
additional heat, see Crypto Heat Page.
- There
are millions of server type computers out there that either
due to movement to the cloud, server age, or the system was
purchased as a backup that are not currently in use and in
many cases there are no plans to ever use.
This application can make use of these servers as very low
operating cost Crypto heaters.
The WIC Miner
will run on any modern Intel/AMD CPU based computer but the hash
rate will be low (under 2Mhash/sec) on typical desktop type
systems. Most servers can achieve
4-12Mhashes/sec. As of this writing this
mining rate will make you the equivalent of a few US$ per week
paying most of the electricity cost.
The WIC Miner
does not monopolize the server and can be used cooperatively
with other common applications used on modestly loaded
servers. The threads that do the hashing run
in idle time minimizing the impact to performance of other
business critical processes that may otherwise be running.
It will quickly pull back on Crypto processing if a
higher priority process spins off a group of threads allowing
time critical workloads to burst process without issue.
The current
version of the WIC Miner for Linux is available for download
here.
WIC Miner usage
instructions are here.
WIC Miner
download MD5SUM value is 965df97e20218936474845e2805156b9
The WIC Miner can be used on almost any modern
computer without installing it by booting a popular live
Linux from USB and following the simple and
quick instructions here.
The WIC Miner
on a server requires a single or dual CPU Intel Xeon or AMD
Epyc/Threadripper based system. In the
case of Intel Xeon it must be Intel Sandy Bridge based (Xeon
E5-26XX) or better which covers most Xeon based systems from the
past decade. It will perform better on newer
processors (past 5 years) which have AVX2 CPU
support. We have optimized the WIC Miner to
run well on older Xeon Servers many of which are no longer in
production use and are great candidates to use as Crypto
heaters.
To get the
best performance it is very important that all available memory
channels are populated with RAM! Read here for more
on this important topic.
WIC Miner has
been tested under Red Hat 7&8, CentOS 7, Suse Enterprise 12
& 15, OpenSuse 42.1, and Ubuntu 16.04. It
has also been tested on more recent versions of these popular
Linux Distributions. It should work under any
Linux release from the past 5 years.
The WIC Miner
can run under VM Ware or a similar
hyper-visor. It will run fine under widely
available (on internet) Linux VM images of CentOS or
Debian. The VM you create for WIC Miner
should be set to (number physical cores per physical CPU – 1)
for VCPU and 8GB of memory for the VM.
We are not
aware of a way of ensuring that memory can be allocated on the
RAM attached to each CPU of a dual processor system.
The best solution for a dual processor system is to run an
instance of the WIC Miner under two VM’s each one locked to one
of the physical CPU’s.
We are
looking at doing a Windows version but must first see how much
interest there is? We would like to hear from
organizations at wicminer@aquilasys.com that would plan to use a
Windows version of the WIC Miner on ten or more servers in your
organization.
If you have a
usage question after reading the usage page and looking for your
question on our faq page you can write us at wicminer@aquilasys.com
with server make/model, cpu config, memory config, Linux
version, and if the WIC Miner is running the wic.stat file and
someone will write back in a few days with an answer to your
question/issue.