Monthly Archives: September 2013

Goodbye Sociable Plugin

I disabled the “Sociable” plugin because it was littering every post with a ton of buttons that just advertised social media sites. You don’t need to see that crap and neither do I. Time has proven that social media is almost entirely valueless anyhow. In ten years nobody will even remember that there was a Google plus.

Overclocking The HP Touchpad For Cryptocurrency

I mention in my September 9th post that I was able to get a Bitcoin/Litecoin mining daemon (cpuminer) running scrypt calculations on the HP Touchpad.

Because a device like that is one of the worst possible things you could use to generate cryptocurrency, I’ve left it running as a dedicated Litecoin mining machine since then. It’s generated nearly a quarter of a cent worth of imaginary money in the past week.

This is a Touchpad with the stock kernel at 1.2 GHz:

[2013-09-09 01:37:27] thread 0: 43849 hashes, 0.74 khash/s
[2013-09-09 01:37:46] thread 1: 46406 hashes, 0.77 khash/s
[2013-09-09 01:38:28] thread 0: 44242 hashes, 0.74 khash/s
[2013-09-09 01:38:46] thread 1: 46395 hashes, 0.77 khash/s
[2013-09-09 01:41:33] thread 1: 23011 hashes, 0.38 khash/s
[2013-09-09 01:41:39] thread 0: 25365 hashes, 0.38 khash/s

The drop to half rate is because the CPU is throttled to half speed when the device goes idle. I’ve heard that you can overclock a Touchpad, but have never looked into it because it’s been fast enough for me.

Here’s a blog post that details how to tweak your Touchpad for performance:

http://jasonnash.com/2011/09/05/tweaking-that-new-hp-touchpad-you-just-got/

This is the Touchpad with the stock webOS Internals “uberkernel” (no settings changed):

[2013-09-09 03:23:58] thread 0: 13388 hashes, 0.30 khash/s
[2013-09-09 03:23:58] thread 1: 13363 hashes, 0.30 khash/s
[2013-09-09 03:25:27] thread 1: 18193 hashes, 0.20 khash/s
[2013-09-09 03:25:27] thread 0: 18232 hashes, 0.20 khash/s
[2013-09-09 03:26:00] thread 1: 12187 hashes, 0.37 khash/s
[2013-09-09 03:26:00] thread 0: 12208 hashes, 0.37 khash/s

That’s worrisome, shouldn’t it be faster? It seems that the stock install optimizes for power savings rather than speed.

With the UberKernel set to OnDemandTcl 1512 (1.512 GHz):

[2013-09-09 03:31:22] thread 1: 57473 hashes, 0.95 khash/s
[2013-09-09 03:31:23] thread 0: 50465 hashes, 0.87 khash/s
[2013-09-09 03:32:20] thread 1: 56374 hashes, 0.98 khash/s
[2013-09-09 03:32:20] thread 0: 51996 hashes, 0.91 khash/s

That’s right, 1.8 khash per second! Blazing fast! You may also notice that it’s bursting as high as 0.98 khash per core…

OK, here goes. I’m probably going to melt my pad, but 1 khash per CPU is within my reach. Could you imagine a 2 khash tablet? Dang, that’d be nosebleed-worthy.

[2013-09-09 03:45:44] thread 1: 67142 hashes, 1.11 khash/s
[2013-09-09 03:46:42] thread 0: 62675 hashes, 1.06 khash/s
[2013-09-09 03:46:43] thread 1: 66417 hashes, 1.11 khash/s
[2013-09-09 03:47:17] thread 0: 37319 hashes, 1.06 khash/s
[2013-09-09 03:47:17] accepted: 2/2 (100.00%), 2.17 khash/s (yay!!!)

Yay indeed. I did it! A kilohash per core per second! 2150 hashes! Victory!

I also tried mining Bitcoin with cpuminer on the HP Touchpad using SHA256 calculations, and the power was considerable there, too:

[2013-09-10 01:20:15] thread 0: 40506764 hashes, 762.24 khash/s
[2013-09-10 01:20:16] thread 1: 47714636 hashes, 789.13 khash/s
[2013-09-10 01:20:58] thread 1: 33848421 hashes, 800.30 khash/s
[2013-09-10 01:20:58] thread 0: 32404380 hashes, 759.41 khash/s

That’s right, more than a three quarters of a megahash! That’s a BTC generating /machine/.

I don’t think this is something I should try to sustain, though. The CPU made it as high as 32 degrees C, in a room that was 24 degrees C at the time.

I’m going to be rich! Wait, you mean I only earned a thousandth of a cent during this experiment? Oh well, there goes my dream of a Touchpad mining farm…. creating a penny worth of imaginary money for each dollar of electricity is something you probably can’t make up on volume.

New Editor Builds

For this build, version 0.59, the name has been changed from “Basternae Editor” to “ModernMUD Editor”. This is because I’m in the process of open-sourcing the codebase, and the editor will work not only for Basternae, but any MUD based on the same codebase.

Other than the name change, there are a few stability fixes, and probably some new bugs. Download links for Windows and OSX/Linux are on the right side of the blog. Enjoy!

Parallel Programming and Cryptocurrencies

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of brain cycles learning parallel programming tools and APIs. These are tools that let you write code to run on your video card (GPU) and/or multiple CPU cores at once. I’ve learned the basics of NVIDIA CUDA, OpenCL, OpenMP, and C++ AMP over the past few weeks. They’re neat things to know, but I’m not really sure what I’d use them for since most of the applications are scientific computing and math-intensive things and that’s not something I’ve ever really focused on.

One of the most useless things that GPUs are used for is mining bitcoins and litecoins. They’re a virtual currency that is created by using math to turn lots of electricity into coins that are worth anywhere from slightly less to a lot less than you paid for the electricity. This imaginary currency will gradually disappear as governments obliterate the exchanges that you can trade them on. They’re doing that because alternative currencies are a threat to them – they’re hard to tax, easy to launder, and undermine the authority of a central bank. These are all generally good things unless you’re a government. Bitcoins and litecoin wallets and exchanges are also frequently hacked/robbed, but nobody knows yet whether those thieving hackers are government-sponsored.

Now that I’ve made it clear that cryptocurrencies are dumb, one thing they are great for is exploring and learning about the capabilities of different hardware and parallel computing APIs. There are plenty of open source mining programs that use CUDA, OpenCL, or CPU-based hash calculations, and you can run a miner on almost anything. If you want to waste electricity, you’ve got options.

I have a wide range of hardware at home and have benchmarked quite a few things. Here are the speeds of various bits of hardware in Litecoin kilohashes per second:

460 hashes/sec – Asus EEE 701 PC with 630 MHz single-core Celeron processor.
1500 hashes/sec – HP Touchpad Tablet with 1.2 GHz dual-core ARM processor.
6200 hashes/sec – Compaq laptop with Core 2 Duo T8100 processor.
13650 hashes/sec – NVIDIA Geforce GT 610 512MB PCI video card.
27400 hashes/sec – NVIDIA Geforce GT 650M 2GB laptop video card.
37000 hashes/sec – AMD Phenom II 1100T six-core processor.
41000 hashes/sec – MSI laptop with i7-3920XM quad-core processor.
52000 hashes/sec – NVIDIA Geforce 640 1GB PCI-E video card.
NULL hashes/sec – ATI Radeon HD 6870 1GB PCI-E video card.

I don’t have much ATI graphics hardware, and for good reason, because one thing is still true – there is *ALWAYS* something broken in their drivers, and in the case of my 6870, OpenCL doesn’t work right on it, so it’s pretty much a brick for this experiment.

The most interesting bit was getting a litecoin miner running on my HP Touchpad. There is a miner daemon called “Pooler’s CPUMiner” that can be compiled for ARM. It almost compiled with the TouchPad SDK, but it required some adjustments to library settings and compile flags to get it to work. After a bit of tinkering I got it to run on the device at a blistering 1510 hashes per second. When the device’s screen is off the CPU runs at half speed, so with the screen off it gets 760 hashes per second. Because I know the masses will be clamoring for a TouchPad binary, I’ve posted it on Github: https://github.com/Xangis/cpuminer

This was an interesting experiment and I’ve managed to generate nearly 10 cents in imaginary money. It only took just over $1 of electricity to get there.

The Magma Codebase Is Worth Millions!

I love how Ohloh estimates the value of open source projects. For instance, here’s their take on the Magma MUD codebase:

I believe Envy is just over 100k lines of code. At the average developer salary of $91,000/year, about $1 million in “value” was created by the Basternae II rebuild team. Value that, due to the DikuMUD license, could never actually be “claimed” through any means.

Just a curiosity, really, but still fun.

Sniktiorg’s Zones

Sniktiorg, one of the most creative and prolific zone creators in the world of MUDs, has granted Basternae 3 permission to use his areas. Woohoo!

I’ll attach them as I get them converted to the new format and figure out where in the world they should go.