Dr. Stephen Perrenod from OrionX has published this First Edition of his biannual list of top cryptocurrency mining pools. In the world of Cryptocurrency Supercomputing, this report looks at this new specialized form of supercomputing known as cryptocurrency mining.
In the supercomputing world, the release of the list of the world’s Top 500 supercomputers is eagerly awaited twice a year, in June and November, in conjunction with the industry’s two largest conferences. The top position has been a matter of national pride, with the U.S., Japan, and China vying for prominence over the years. Computer manufacturers in the High Performance Computing space also compete strongly for position, helping customers tune their systems for optimal benchmark results.
Cryptocurrency mining operations are becoming quite large, albeit powered typically by custom ASIC computing rigs rather than general purpose CPUs. As is true for the supercomputing list, GPUs can also contribute significantly, in this case for the hashing algorithms used to mine cryptos. Crypto mining is also characterized by the presence of decentralized mining pools, that allow individuals to contribute their hashing power to a given pool in return for a proportionate share of rewards.
In the supercomputer world, for the Top 500 list, a machine, or very large tightly integrated compute cluster, is at a single location. The requirement to run Linpack, solving a system of linear equations, plays to such an integrated system tied together with a high performance interconnect.
Cryptocurrency mining may be centralized or highly distributed. Running the mining algorithms requires extensive trial and error with many seeds, or ‘nonces’ fed into SHA-256(SHA-256{ }) or some other hashing protocol, in an attempt to get an eligible result. This is inherently an embarrassingly parallel process across nonce guesses, and thus easily distributed over the Internet. And that happens to a large degree as this new form of decentralized money, Money in the Internet as we like to call it, gets mined.
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