dc.contributor.advisor | Morrison, Donn | |
dc.contributor.advisor | Umuroglu, Yaman | |
dc.contributor.author | Langland, Torbjørn | |
dc.contributor.author | Skordal, Kristian Klomsten | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2015-10-09T14:01:16Z | |
dc.date.available | 2015-10-09T14:01:16Z | |
dc.date.created | 2015-06-10 | |
dc.date.issued | 2015 | |
dc.identifier | ntnudaim:12754 | |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/11250/2353553 | |
dc.description.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. | |
dc.language | eng | |
dc.publisher | NTNU | |
dc.subject | Datateknologi (2 årig), Komplekse datasystemer | |
dc.subject | Datateknologi, Komplekse datasystemer | |
dc.title | Mining Bitcoins using a Heterogeneous Computer Architecture | |
dc.type | Master thesis | |
dc.source.pagenumber | 54 | |