Gridcoin Mining with 80kW of hydroelectric power
Most cryptocurrencies produce only a lot of hot air and if the value of that currencies is falling to zero, the only result was a lot of wasted power and resources. That's pretty bad!
The idea behind Gridcoin is great and I think BOINC and all projects within will benefit a lot on that. Producing usable output and earning money with it is a perfect combination. And even if the value of Gridcoin will fall to zero, there will be usable output for mankind that lasts longer.
That's a good point to choose Gridcoin and why I choosed it. I want to mine at big scale and post my experience here. But first of all I want to thank all in the forum for posting a lot of useful information, especially @dutch and @vortac.
OK, now the details:
We are using the power of a small 80kW hydroelectric power plant in Austria.
At the moment one computer with about 1kW power consumption is running (i5-7400, 2x AMD Radeon RX Vega 56, 2x Geforce 1080).
The goal is to use nearly the full power of the power plant with about 80 computer, but without using power from the grid if something is wrong with the generator, or on maintenance etc...
So I decided to use a Raspberry Pi (RPi, because of the low power consumption ;-) ) to control the power usage of each computer. The power plant monitors it's output with a SmartHome solution by Loxone and in the case the power output is below the used power, the RPi suspends as much computers as needed to reduce the power consumption to the needed value, or even near zero on putting the computers in standby and waking them up per WOL again.
Another problem is managing projects on up to 80 computers. Now I am using BAM, but I think a homemade solution on the RPi would be great too. I've to think about it...
So that was the first view of my Gridcoin project. I's all under development and I will post the next step with images asap here.
80 kW of computational science! This deserves a #beyondbitcoin tag. Cause it truly is beyond Bitcoin (and wasteful hashing in general).
Tag added, thanks!
If you have local area network, you can make the Pi SSH into the computers and initiate the appropriate command. This should be faster than BAM.
Ready to deploy private BAM would be useful.
Yes, I am doing this to suspend and resume the projects to avoid using power from the grid (on maintance of the power plant or not enough water, etc...)
My private BAM is under development since two weeks, so far away from being useful ;)
But maybe I'll put it on GitHub later.
Wow thats great glat to see another clean energy user! I have a 4kWp solar array that I use to run my Gridcoin machines in the daytime, thats a i7-6700k + GTX780Ti an old Laptop i5-420M a Pi 3, a PI2 and a Pi zero, plus an Android Tablet and 2 x Android phones.
My Pi nodes are used for 24/7 staking of cryptos.
Im interesred in how you get the Pis to control the output of the miners, can you share that please?
I've installed boinc-client on the pi and using Boinccmd Tool to suspend or resume the tasks on the big miners. Loxone sends the actual power to the pi using http get, a PHP script on the Pi is calculating the needed changes and suspends or resumes the projects.
Good luck on this fine project!
Thanks!
80 computers running on clean energy -- that's awesome! I'm jealous...
I'll definitely come back to see updates on your project's development!