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Mining Bitcoins using a Heterogeneous Computer Architecture

Langland, Torbjørn; Skordal, Kristian Klomsten
Master thesis
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URI
http://hdl.handle.net/11250/2353553
Date
2015
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Abstract
Recent years have seen the emergence of a new class of currencies, called

cryptocurrencies. These currencies use cryptography to provide security

and peer-to-peer networking to provide a decentralized system. Bitcoin is

the most popular of these currencies. It uses a two-pass

SHA-256 hash at its core. Producing new bitcoins is done through a process

referred to as "mining", which involves a brute-force search for a hash with

a specific value. This process requires large amounts of computing power.

Current-generation hardware for bitcoin mining includes highly-optimized

ASIC chips which provide huge amounts of performance. However, designers of

such chips are having problems with delivering enough power and cooling

to the chips. To alleviate this problem, this thesis looks at the possibilities

of using heterogeneous computing to reduce power consumption and produce a more

energy-efficient mining solution.

A SHA-256 accelerator and a DMA module is developed and integrated into a tile for

the Single-ISA Heterogeneous MAny-core Computer, SHMAC, and a system with

multiple cores is used to exploit the thread-level parallelism provided by

the platform. The system is tested using a benchmark to find out what performance

and energy efficiency can be expected when using the system for bitcoin mining.

The results show a maximum performance of 175,7 kH/s when running the benchmark

application on 14 cores using the SHA-256 accelerator and the DMA module. The best

energy efficiency was obtained when running on 14 cores without the DMA enabled,

at 163,2 kH/J. The results does not compare well to specialized FPGA-based

bitcoin miners, but demonstrates the SHMAC platform's large degree of thread-level parallelism

which can be better exploited in other applications.
Publisher
NTNU

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