[GTALUG] NOT: Re: From BTRFS to what?

[Howard Gibson]

Alvin,

   The bright sun is not the best place to put a heat sink.  

   How many Watts are we talking about here, and what sort of budget do you have?  Can the system be too cold?

On Wed, 6 Sep 2017 09:06:41 -0400
Alvin Starr via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:

> Wow. got into a bit of a snitfest with dhaval.giani over this one.
> 
> Now to the completely unrelated part.
> 
> I have been thinking about a project and I would like to bounce it off you.
> 
> A client came to me asking about helping him setup an Etherium mining 
> server pool.
> 
> This got me thinking.
> 
> In its simplest sense the process is power in ..... ETH out.
> The biggest cost is power then cooling to get rid of all the head from 
> the GPU's.
> 
> What if you glue a GPU with very little extra hardware to the back of a 
> solar panel.
> Stick it out in the sun and let it calculate 8-10 hours a day.
> Put a big heat sink on the GPU and it should be able to stay cool enough 
> just from air cooling
> 
> Take a few thousand of these and set them out in a sunny place and you 
> would have a coin generator.
> Once the hardware is paid for then the operational cost would be close 
> to 0 but for some glass cleaner and rags.
> 
> They would need to be networked together but it does not have to be high 
> speed.
> It could be a low power mesh to an edge that connects via something as 
> simple as cell phone data.
> 
> Solar panels cost about $1/watt and there is no ongoing cost but power 
> here costs about $0.08-0.16/KWH.
> On the face of it there is a 3 year payback for the power but if you add 
> in 30% extra power to run cooling and the building costs for housing the 
> mining pool.
> 
> 
> Am I crazy?
> 
> -- 
> Alvin Starr                   ||   land:  (905)513-7688
> Netvel Inc.                   ||   Cell:  (416)806-0133
> alvin at netvel.net              ||
> 
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-- 
Howard Gibson 
hgibson at eol.ca
jhowardgibson at gmail.com
http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson