GPU plot generator v4.1.1 (Win/Linux)



  • Hello, I am very new to Burst and cryptos in general but I really liked the idea of mining using a HDD. I am running into some issues while using the GPUPlotGenerator.

    First some back story. I looked up how to set up plots via YouTube and I started using the GPUPlotGenerator. I was running tests on small plots so see how everything worked and then yesterday I decided to attempt doing my first large plot (1500GB) using direct. I had the plotter run and I noticed it was not updating the % value. I did however notice that the plot on the drive was getting larger so I figured the update was just lagging behind. I woke up this morning to see that the plot was now the correct size but the percent was now updating at an incredibly slow amount. That is when I found this forum and read through everyone's very awesome replies. Now I know that I was using an older version of the GPUPlotGenerator and it will no longer take hours to create the initial harddrive space for the plot. However, I am still getting very slow plot times (1000 nonces/min). I am also monitoring my GPU and it will hit 100% load for a very short time (30 seconds) and then not use the GPU for a very long time. This leads me to believe that it is not my GPU being the bottle neck even though I am using a AMD Radeon R9 200 Series 2GB. The external that I am writing to is a Seagate Expansion which (from reading other posts) is very slow for plotting but my 1000 nonces/min seems extraordinary slow compared to what I have read. I have tried running tests for 1TB on my internal HDD using the newest version of the GPUPlotGenerator and I am receiving very similar results. My internal harddrives are 3 1TB Seagates configured in RAID 5.

    My Device.txt is set up like this: 1 0 1024 128 8192.

    If anyone has any insight on how to best speed up plot times I would greatly appreciate it. That or I will have to plot a 8TB in 2 weeks >_>

    Thanks!


  • admin

    @RandAlthor

    The external that I am writing to is a Seagate Expansion

    This an SMR drive, your plotting experience is going to be painful, but once done you'll mine just fine.



  • @haitch Thanks for the reply. I have been running some more tests and I am having much better performance using the buffer mode (17000/min). From my understanding, it will not create optimized plots and I will later have to optimize the plots. Since I ultimately want my plots to be optimized, should I first create them using the buffer mode and then optimize them or is it better to just plot them using Direct?

    Also, when using direct I get long (like an hour+) periods where the percent will not change and seems frozen. Is that expected?

    Lastly, do you have a recommendation on non-SMR external drives so I can be sure I purchase something that is good but also cost effective? Or is it just best to get the most $ per TB and then grit me teeth through the painful plot creation?

    Thanks!


  • admin

    @RandAlthor If you have the space, plot buffered, then optimize to the new drive.

    As for new storage: https://forums.burst-team.us/topic/6215/bulk-purchase



  • @haitch is there a thread for how to optimize plots post creation similar to how this one talks about the GPU Plot Generator? I thought I saw one earlier but I can't find it now. Also, are Western Digital the only non-SMR drives or are there others? I don't think I am ready to do a bulk purchase at the moment since I am still very new and just trying grasp how this stuff works.



  • I tried optimizing plots after creation. I was unendurably lengthy. I decided to nix that process and just replotted the drive from scratch.


  • admin

    @RandAlthor The bulk purchase can be 1 drive - it's bulk for the whole community, but you can get 1.

    As for non-SMR, pretty much anyone other than Seagate - WD, Samsung, HGST ...



  • @haitch Ah thank!

    @vmantilla did you experience major low downs when plotting with Direct? When I try to plot just 1TB, it will slow down to and sometime hang for an hour+. Maybe this is because the drive is an SMR?

    Also, does the difference between SMR and non-SMR only really show when plotting or is it a big difference when mining too? It would be ok if I just buy one non-SMR and then create an optimized plot to it then copy it over to a cheaper SMR drive, rigt?



  • @cryo anyways to resume the plot like xPlotter does :? ( just a enhancement )



  • @haitch would it be faster to plot direct to a drive that is not SMR? then transfer or no?


  • admin

    @HiDevin plotting to a regular drive, then transferring will be faster, but when I tried it, Windows was telling me it'd take 10 days to copy the file. Your mileage may be different .......



  • @haitch i did that with a 1tb file it took 7 hours to transfer i decided to just replot the next drive... giving gpuplotgen a whirl in direct mode on a usb 3.0 4tb sata 3 tb and usb 2.0 1tb drive.... the 4tb said it will be done in 17 hours...


  • admin

    @Lunas Good luck with that ............



  • @HiDevin Not for the moment. I have too much work to add this feature for now.



  • @Lunas said in GPU plot generator v4.1.1 (Win/Linux):

    I decided to just replot the next drive... giving gpuplotgen a whirl in direct mode on a usb 3.0 4tb sata 3 tb and usb 2.0 1tb drive.... the 4tb said it will be done in 17 hours...

    What GPU & Pc Etc are you using? Please let us know if it works out Ok. And what your (successful) Devices/Command parameters are. Thanks.



  • @BeholdMiNuggets i need to play with my devices file but currently
    im using 1792 192 8192
    with a r9 280x
    when i left it earlier it was going at 13k n/min with an estimate of 17 hours on the 4tb drive

    the pc is as follows
    Asrock a88x fata1ty killer+
    amd athlon x4 845
    8gb 2133mhz

    my drives are as follows
    1x 240 gb m500 crucial ssd no plots boot drive
    2x 4tb WD my books
    1x 3tb HGST Ultrastar 7K4000 enterprise
    2x 1tb wd essentials usb 2.0 with wd green warranty is up might shell them
    1x 500gb toshiba pocket size external
    1x 500gb hitachi 2.5" drive laptop salvage
    1x 500gb WD green
    1x 250gb hgst 2.5" laptop salvage
    1x 160gb hgst 2.5" laptop salvage
    1x 1tb WD black only 400gb it has other things on it...
    i also have all my thumb drives and micro sd that were not being used on it too... totaling 352gb
    4x 16gb thumb drives
    1x 32gb pny thumb drive slow and no longer reliable
    1x 32gb san disk
    32gb g.skill micro sd class 10 (10mb/s writes)
    64gb sony micro sd class 10 (best write speeds of the 3 24-40mb/s)
    128 gb pny micro sd class 10 (might be counterfeit has a slow write speed when advertised at much faster)

    Star tech 4 controller usb 3.0 pci-e 4x



  • @Lunas said in GPU plot generator v4.1.1 (Win/Linux):

    @BeholdMiNuggets i need to play with my devices file but currently
    im using 1792 192 8192
    with a r9 280x
    when i left it earlier it was going at 13k n/min with an estimate of 17 hours on the 4tb drive

    I've had 35000n/m with a R9-280x.
    You are most probably chocking on output to disk.
    What is your i/o looking like ?



  • @cryo said in GPU plot generator v4.1.1 (Win/Linux):

    @vaxman The direct mode improvements are on the 4.1+ version. I updated the plotter to v4.1.3 to support CentOS (6 & 7) build (there is even CentOS binaries compiled against CUDA 8.0 SDK on my repository now).

    About your mixed AMD/NVidia environment, there is no runtime inter-compatibility between AMD and NVidia cards for now.
    Nevertheless, you can build two plotters: one with the libOpenCL.so from the CUDA SDK, and one with the AMD SDK. You won't be able to plot to one single file with your two cards together but it's not the best choice anyway if you use the direct mode.

    I'm not using direct mode, as buffer fits my environment much better.
    I have it up+running with 4x Tesla M2090, streaming 47kn/m to a stripe,
    optimizing from there to Seagate Archive SMR (185 MB/s down to 95 MB/s at max capacity). zfs is perfect for large files on SMR disks - no lag.

    devices.txt

    1 0 8192 512 8192
    1 1 8192 512 8192
    1 2 8192 512 8192
    1 3 8192 512 8192
    

    As this is the maximum I can ingest, I'll look into Radeon setup when plotting is finished.
    Didn't plan to use Nvidia/AMD combined in one job, anyway. I was looking into docker containers to have an easy setup for switching between plotting Burst and mining other coins on that box, as it hides so nicely in the racks, 6 GPU in 2 RU; Supermicro 2027-TRTH, cheap (for the build quality you get) on ebay.

    So, one of my first transactions ever (1564546818816845010) was totally worth it.
    Hope you did'nt sell the 10k Burst too soon. 8)

    People, do not forget to give something back! Send this man some Burst !



  • @vaxman Thank you for your support :)



  • @luxe said in GPU plot generator v4.1.1 (Win/Linux):

    Found some time to finally test improved 'direct' mode in 4.1.1 (win)
    Impressive work @cryo, thanks a lot. I always used the 'buffer' mode until now, due it was faster for me, to use that and optimize after that. But now 'direct' mode works just awesome, and i love directly create optimized plots.

    As i plotted with the same GPU that is used for mining with jminer ... I had to choose some quite conservative settings in devices.txt, to not slow down mining too much. So for my 'RX 480' i used:

    1 0 8192 256 4096
    

    I only plotted to one drive at once for now. I suggest use as much memory as possible, as it reduces the needed drive operations and speeds up plotting a lot.

    My 'plot.bat' file to be able to run as admin:

    @setlocal
    @cd /d %~dp0 
    gpuPlotGenerator.exe generate direct E:/temp/12760599261465029898_7200000000_15257600_102400
    @pause
    

    15257600 for a ~4TB drive
    102400 to use 25GB of RAM (using ~6,25GB RAM reduces my nonces/minute by 25% )

    The result:
    0_1498222271286_Unbenannt.PNG

    Quite sure i can tweak it a little more, but for me, even with the conservative settings, it was twice as fast as plotting optimized via CPU.
    Round times with jminer increased by ~50% while plotting ... but both worked flawless together on same GPU.

    Edit: Update result of using two drives instead of one

    @setlocal
    @cd /d %~dp0 
    gpuPlotGenerator.exe generate direct F:/temp/12760599261465029898_7300000000_7628800_51200 E:/temp/12760599261465029898_7310000000_7628800_51200
    @pause
    

    0_1498325964361_2drives.PNG

    So write speed was the bottleneck on using one drive, with two drives i could increase speed by ~25%.

    I just started using the updated plotter in direct mode, it seems rather amazing speed wise compared to those using buffer mode, at least when paired with drives that can handle the write speed as you mentioned... I will have to try writing multiple plots to multiple drives at once as your followup showed... although I think I am roughly near my peak with my 1050 ti at 23000 nonces on the Ironwolf 10TB drive, testing it will give me 230MB/s but I only get 100MB/s when plotting with my current setup, this is a fun use for unused hardware...

    0 0 1024 16 8192

    0_1498508033845_1000GB at 23535 nonces while mining.png

    I can't wait to try out plotting two files at once, is there a command line option to create files in a series rather than parallel, or is it best to just make a batch file to launch each command line in succession, not sure I want to commit to such large files in case something goes wrong, now that I think about it, maybe I want to make smaller 256GB files rather than 1TB files... paranoia has begun...

    there is no realistic performance difference as far as Burstcoin is concerned between smaller and larger plots right? as far as I have read so far a plot is a plot is a plot, since you won't get "better" deadlines due to file size, just overall volume of plots is the way to have more "lottery tickets" as you guys say...


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