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Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code

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Re: Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code

#21

Post by edgesrazor »

paulhodge wrote: post #12
edgesrazor wrote: post #10

I'd been doing my own research on viability of mining on Amazon, and I posed a question on the AWS forums asking how it's possible the spot prices could be going so high. There's instances going anywhere from 5-20 times their On-Demand prices. At this time, no one's answered it, so if anyone here knows, I'd love to hear why someone would pay $10.00 per hour for an instance they can get On-Demand for $2.40.

One guess, maybe the spot price is controlled by some sort of predictive algorithm, and the algorithm got totally confused by the recent load? It might not be the case that people are actually paying that price.

That's what I assumed, but if you look at the history, the prices have been trending like this for over a month now.

Re: Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code

#22

Post by michaelt »

edgesrazor wrote: post #20
michaelt wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One pricing strategy I've heard of goes like so: No rational person would bid above the on demand price, so the spot price will never rise above the on demand price. Therefore if I bid just above the on demand price I'll never be outbid, and I won't have to deal with automating the switch from spot to on demand instances. Needless to say, this logic is wrong.

Funny you should mention that. There was a blog post I had read where they were discussing an unfortunate AWS customer who bid $999.00/hour for Spot instances thinking it would protect their running servers from shutting down. Little did this person realize, Amazon - unlike eBay - doesn't just accept the next highest bid, they accept THE highest bid. They were running a Spot instance for an entire month at $999/hour.…

What do you suppose is displayed when there are no spot instances available, because all resources are being used for on demand instances or there's some problem with the spot market system?

Re: Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code

#23

Post by VMG »

throwaway0094 wrote: post #4

So: 1.5 weeks of work. $50-$75/mo/instance. x20-60 instances. Worked for 3-4 weeks. If we assume the most optimistic parameters: $75 * 1mo * 60 instances = $4500 in profit for 1.5 weeks of work, or a rate of ~$156k/yr. Edit: It looks like I misread his revenue numbers for profit. Oops! Even lower margins: "My gross revenue was about $1000, and I paid Amazon $500 of that." $500 for 1.5 weeks' work is only $17k/yr rate…

the difficulty rises with time

Re: Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code

#24

Post by wmf »

KVFinn wrote: post #18

Is it just a quirk of the GPU architecture that Nvidia can't mine as well as AMD or it a problem with their cards?

Graphics and HPC are mostly floating point but SHA and scrypt are all integer, so it's kind of an accident that any GPU does well on them. AMD GPUs have a a rotate instruction that's worth a lot in SHA and tend to have better integer performance in general.

Re: Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code

#25

Post by dgacmu »

KVFinn wrote: post #18

Is it just a quirk of the GPU architecture that Nvidia can't mine as well as AMD or it a problem with their cards?

AFAICT, it's a result of their internal architectural decisions vs. the structure of some of these crypto operations. The simplest example is that AMD offers a hardware bit rotate instruction and NVidia doesn't. (The newer compute_35 devices have a funnel shifter that gets halfway there, but it requires using a 64 bit op, which is still slower).

But beyond that, for scrypt, AMD has an internal architecture that encourages using a internal 4-wide vector ops (the key being that threads in a stream can diverge and the scheduler handles them, but the vector ops are strictly locked). This seems to give them an advantage in several "stupidly parallel" workloads that consist of basic operations in huge parallel, whereas Nvidia's architecture regains ground when the control flow/etc., becomes a bit more complicated. But calculating 64k SHA-2 or scrypt hashes in parallel doesn't stress the thread scheduler or divergence handling at all. Also, scrypt internally does well when you parallelize it into groups of 4 uint32's - that's actually the key optimization I added to my version of the miner. Which, again, maps quite nicely to AMD's preferred optimization path.

Re: Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code

#26

Post by zwily »

edgesrazor wrote: post #20
michaelt wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One pricing strategy I've heard of goes like so: No rational person would bid above the on demand price, so the spot price will never rise above the on demand price. Therefore if I bid just above the on demand price I'll never be outbid, and I won't have to deal with automating the switch from spot to on demand instances. Needless to say, this logic is wrong.

Funny you should mention that. There was a blog post I had read where they were discussing an unfortunate AWS customer who bid $999.00/hour for Spot instances thinking it would protect their running servers from shutting down. Little did this person realize, Amazon - unlike eBay - doesn't just accept the next highest bid, they accept THE highest bid. They were running a Spot instance for an entire month at $999/hour.…

That's not true - the price you set is the max price you're willing to pay. If your price is higher than the current spot price, you pay the current spot price. The blog post author must be mistaken somehow.

Re: Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code

#27

Post by zwily »

AWS is adding an upper limit to spot price bids of 4X the on-demand cost, as of December 20:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-spo...

This may be in response to some of the crazy bids we've seen on the spot market since people started using it for mining.

Re: Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code

#28

Post by throwaway0094 »

qq66 wrote: post #11
throwaway0094 wrote: post #4

So: 1.5 weeks of work. $50-$75/mo/instance. x20-60 instances. Worked for 3-4 weeks. If we assume the most optimistic parameters: $75 * 1mo * 60 instances = $4500 in profit for 1.5 weeks of work, or a rate of ~$156k/yr. Edit: It looks like I misread his revenue numbers for profit. Oops! Even lower margins: "My gross revenue was about $1000, and I paid Amazon $500 of that." $500 for 1.5 weeks' work is only $17k/yr rate…

You also don't need to sing in the shower. You can leave the shower earlier, hire a TaskRabbit to sing for you instead, and if you value your time correctly you should come out ahead.

Yeah, but I don't recommend singing in the shower for 1.5 weeks while your employer is paying you sick leave ;-).

Re: Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code

#29

Post by jordanthoms »

I've been mining on my AMD 290x for the past few days - I brought it for gaming, so I don't need to get a return on the hardware, and the heat generated is useful too - it keeps my apartment a little warmer. Looking at a profit of around $8 per day at current difficulty, which is a pretty cheap heating solution!
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