While getting my morning coffee earlier today (long night yesterday – very long night …) I got an email by one of my users, asking about whether I’d ever planned to add support for mining Sumokoin, and in my ignorance replied right away with “sure, I support that for a long while” … hm. In retrospect, that answer probably didn’t sound all too intelligent, for the simple fact that I had completely missed the news that Sumokoin (or “Sumo” for short) had recently also done an algorithm fork similar to Monero, with yet another algorithm (called “cryptonight heavy”)…. and until he told me about it I hadn’t even known about it. Well, guess I didn’t earn the biggest mark of excellence on this one…
Anyway – after I finally did realize that I had simply been a rather ignorant fool in my first reply I had a look at this new “cryptonight heavy” thing, and have to say, it’s actually quite an interesting modification: Unlike the rather cosmettic “v7” modifications that monero did this really did some major changes. In particular, “heavy” changes the scratchpad size from 2MB to 4MB per thread, which means that it’s now “heavy” indeed in its cache impact. Still, the effort to code this up didn’t look all too awful, so I looked up the profit estimator on whattomine to see if it would even be worth it … and looks like it actuallly did: with so few miners out there, and with such a heavy cost on regular cpus, the profitability of this “new sumo” is now way higher than other coins (long may it last…). So with that, I finally did sit down and implemented the changes – which after all the recent re-orgs to support turned out to be relatively little work.
Long story short: I just uploaded a new version (v0.10.2) to the usual place (http://www.lukminer.net/releases) that has preliminary/experimental support for this “xnheavy” coin type. “Preliminary” in that case means that there’s still some loose ends – in particular, I currently support this coin time only for the cpu, phi, and mpss-knl miners; and knc-native, mpss-knc, and ocl will, for now, simply refuse to run if you tell them to mine heavy (of course they’ll still run the other algorithms, though). For cpu, phi, and mpss-knl variants I’ve now tested for several hours on pool.sumokoin, and it seems to be working out of the box. Performance on CPUs is way lower than old cryptonight, because with the larger scratchpad you can only use half as many threads. On the KNLs (7210, 7220 etc) performance is way better – still about 20% slower than old cryptonight, but that’s still quite tolerable. In fact, with just three (admittedly rather hefty) machines I currently seem to be making about 5% of the pool hash rate on pool.sumokoin.com, so it can’t be all that bad ;-). To give you an idea: I currently get about 2500H/s on a 7210, and about 18kH/s on the 8×7220 “monster” machine I described in that past article …
To run: download the latest 0.10.2 release from http://www.lukminer.net/releases, unpack, and run with the “-a xnheavy” or “-a sumo” flags, for example like that:
./luk-phi -a sumo --host pool.sumokoin.com --port 4444 --user Sumoo6SgKXMD8NcBFzqB1QBzmRPiLeJxFPUmcy7tfM88br8y76G6EGTi8ireo3dy1VcSiK5sVKB4wbpcHtCu32RLBGMbZ1Nbfx3
(you should of course change the –user field, though I won’t complain if you don’t 🙂 ).
I think there’s also some other coins that have adopted this algorithm (somebody asked earlier today), and if they do say that they use “cryptonight heavy” then it should actaully work – but I haven’t tested anything other than Sumo, so no guarantees. If you do find one and happen to try it out, feel free to share!
With that: Happy mining!
PS: Yes, of course I’ll add opencl and knc support ASAP…
The lukMiner blog 
any chance to add hodl support?
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I don’t even know what hodl is – would it be decently profitable?
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Just had a look – market cap of only $800,000, with a trading volume of less than $1k :-/… not sure that’s worth it ?
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Will you be adding support for other major algos (ie Equihash, ethash, etc.) or is Cryptonight algos the best bet for these and those better left for the GPUs?
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Hi, thanks much for the continued development 🙂
Any news on when you will potentially release an Ethash version of lukminer? Last I read you managed to get 11.5MH/s per PHI (using only 1/5th of MCDRAM bandwidth), any improvements since then?
Thanks
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Last time I checked I was at 17MH/s, might get that up to maybe twice that, but even then it’d be a fraction of the revenue you get on monero or sumo… so not really sure anybody would actually use it (and as such, it’s not exactly top priority right now :-/)
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That’s true currently, however profitability might change around pretty quickly as we learned previously, with Bitmain ASICs and all that. (I believe Ethash was more profitable before the fork on most hardware). So having Ethash as a backup might not be a bad idea.
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And I should have kept reading haha, see prior comment I left
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Can you provide concrete hashing differences between Sumo before heavy and after heavy on Phi 7210 or 7220. I want to know if a 4 blade system can get over 10KH/s on Heavy or if its actually seeing a 20% reduction on CN Heavy.
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Sorry for the late reply – problem with measuring 7210s is that all my systems are in colo, so I’ll first have to drive there to measure (they can get out to mine, but I can’t get in remotely from the outside :-/). The one data point I _can_ provide, though, is that the 7240P PCI cards make sligthly more than 3kH. My 8x 7240P system (I just built a second one, so have that at home where I could measure) currently makes ca 25kH/s (+/- 500 depending on the moon phases :-/), so four such cards should most definitely go over 10kH (more like 12, in fact).
Now of course the 7240Ps could perform better on heavy than the 7210s – I really have to measure – but given that it’ll be mostly MCDRAM bound I doubt that this would drop it from 12 to below 10kH.
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Good news, I’ve got my hands on a 2U4N (Intel, not ASRock). With the latest BIOS it gets upward of 3050 H/s per node using the LukStick.
That’s right, BETTER than Monero v7. I was going to ask you why…
Will check performance on a 2U4N with 7250s tomorrow.
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Sorry for the late reply – usually I get pings from wordpress if there’s something to approve, this time I apparently didn’t
As to the hash rate: Was that for monero v7, or was that for sumo/cryptonight heavy? Heavy is actually a slightly “cheaper” algorithm if you have fast memory – it’s harder for regular CPUs because it has a higher memory footprint (so can feed less cores from fixed size cache), but with fast enough memory it’s actually slightly cheaper than v7.
If the 3050H/s was for XMR or XMRv7, then well, I did a few more optimizations – but hadven’t actually tracked it too much recently. Either way it’s good to hear that the latest BIOS is doing well!
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Has anyone else had difficulty getting the ‘stick image’ to boot ?
Admittedly I am a Linux newbie, although I do have a existing GPU mining rig.
My motherboard is an Asus Z10PE-D8WS, I know it boots to USB (as I installed my windows OS that way), and I had had the lukstick boot once – at which point it told me my cfg file had errors
I am pretty sure the problem is linked to UEFI , but ive tried all the options I can see – so though I would throw it out to you guys that have a rig up and running
Thanks in advance
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Almost surely that’s a problem with the USB stick being a little bit smaller than what the ISO image expects it to be. I’ve already resized the latest version from 16GB to 15.7GB, but guess I’ll have to make the next one even smaller
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