CudaMiner release December 18th 2013 - beta release --------------------------------------------------this is a CUDA accelerated mining application for litecoin and

scrypt based altcoins only. The computationally heavy parts of the scrypt algorithm (the Salsa 20/8 iterations and optionally the SHA256 based message digest) are run on the GPU. You should see a notable speed-up compared to OpenCL based miners. Some numbers from my testing: GTX 260: 44 kHash/sec (maybe more on Linux/WinXP) GTX 460: 100 kHash/sec GTX 560Ti: 160 kHash/sec (or 235 kHash/sec on the 448 core edition) and now thanks GTX 640: 89 GT 750M: 80 GTX 660Ti: 250 GTX 780Ti: 500 to David Andersen's work: kHash/sec (formerly 65 kHash/s) kHash/sec (formerly 55 kHash/s) kHash/sec (formerly 186 kHhash/s) kHash/sec (formerly 450 kHash/s non overclocked)

Your nVidia cards will no longer suck so bad for mining! This tool will automatically use all nVidia GPUs found in your system, but the used device count can be limited to a lower number using the "-t" option, or even selected individually with the "-d" option This code is based on the pooler cpuminer 2.3.2 release and inherits its command line interface and options. Additional command line options are: --no-autotune disables the built-in autotuning feature for maximizing CUDA kernel efficiency and uses some heuristical guesswork, which might not be optimal. [-d] gives a list of CUDA device IDs to operate on. Device IDs start counting from 0!

--devices

--launch-config [-l] specify the kernel launch configuration per device. This replaces autotune or heuristic selection. You can pass the strings "auto" or just a kernel prefix like L or F or K or T to autotune for a specific card generation or a kernel prefix plus a lauch configuration like F28x8 if you know what kernel runs best (from a previous autotune). --interactive [-i] list of flags (0 or 1) to enable interactive desktop performance on individual cards. Use this to remove lag at the cost of some hashing performance. Do not use large launch configs for devices that shall run in interactive mode - it's best to use autotune!

--texture-cache [-C] list of flags (0 or 1 or 2) to enable use of the texture cache for reading from the scrypt scratchpad. 1 uses a 1D cache, whereas 2 uses a 2D texture layout. Cached operation has proven to be slightly faster than noncached operation on most GPUs. --single-memory [-m] list of flags (0 or 1) to make the devices

allocate their scrypt scratchpad in a single, consecutive memory block. On Windows Vista, 7/8 this may lead to a smaller memory size being used. When using the texture cache this option is implied. --hash-parallel [-H] scrypt also has a small SHA256 component to it: 0 hashes this single threaded on the CPU. 1 to enable multithreaded hashing on the CPU. 2 offloads everything to the GPU (default) >>> Example command line options, advanced use <<< cudaminer.exe -H 2 -d 0,1,2 -i 1,0,0 -l auto,F27x3,K28x4 -C 0,2,1 -o stratum+tcp://coinotron.com:3334 -O workername:password The option -H 2 uses the GPU for all hashing work, which puts very little load on the CPU. I instruct cudaminer to use devices 0,1 and 2. Because I have the display attached to device 0, I set that device to run in interactive mode so it is fully responsive for desktop use while mining. Device 0 performs autotune and runs in interactive mode because I explicitly set the launch config to auto and the corresponding interactive flag is 1. Device 1 will use kernel launch configuration F27x3 (for Fermi) and device 2 uses K28x4 (for Kepler) both in non-interactive mode. I turn on the use of the texture cache to 2D for device 1, 1D for device 2 and off for devices 0. The given -o/-O settings mine on the coinotron pool using the stratum protocol. >>> Additional Notes <<< This tool is for LTC and other scrypt based altcois only. Compute 1.0 through 1.3 devices seem to run faster on Windows XP or Linux because these OS'es use a more efficient driver model. The 64bit cudaminer sometimes mines a bit slower than the 32 bit binary (increased register pressure, as pointers take two registers in a 64 bit CUDA build!). Try both versions and compare! There is also some SHA256 computation required to do scrypt hashing, which can be done by the CPU as well as your GPU. This code should be fine on nVidia GPUs ranging from compute capability 1.1 up to compute capability 3.5. To see what autotuning does, enable the debug option (-D) switch. You will get a table of kHash/s for a variety of launch configurations. You may only want to do this when running on a single GPU, otherwise the autotuning output of multiple cards will get all mixed up. >>> RELEASE HISTORY <<< The December 18th milestone transitions cudaminer to CUDA 5.5, which

makes it require newer nVidia drivers unfortunately. However users of Kepler devices will see a significant speed boost of 30% for Compute 3.0 devices and around 10% for Compute 3.5 devices. This was made possible by David Andersen who posted his more efficient miner code under Apache license. This release marks a first step of integrating his work. The December 10th milestone marks the release that allows doing serious mining with weak single/dual core CPUs. -H 2 offloads everything to the graphics chip, putting CPU utilization close to idle. It also fixes a bug that caused a small percentage of hashes to not validate on the CPU (especially on Kepler devices with Compute 3.5). The December 7th release now targets SM_20 for the Fermi kernel and SM_30 for the Spinlock (Kepler) kernel. This shortens the PTX code (and hence the binary) and may also result in a few extra kHash/s. Compatibility with CUDA 5.5 suffered unfortunately, so please compile the code with the CUDA 5.0 toolkit. Also http:// and https:// URLs are no longer opened with the stratum protocol handler, but rather with getwork. The December 1st release reduces the likelyhood of autotune crashing and offers a better parsing of the command line. The -l, -C, -i, -m options can now be given less comma separated arguments than the number of devices specified with either the -t or -d options. This facilitates specifying identical launch configs or cache settings for several cards at once. e.g. -d 0,1 -K30x8 -C 2 now specifies the same launch config and cache settings for CUDA devices #0 and #1. The code now checks whether the user specified non-existant CUDA devices via command line options. - the November 20 release removes a possible reason for crashing Legacy and Fermi kernels and adds some of the latest optimizations to the Legacy kernel as well. - November 15th brings a slight performance boost for Kepler kernels, and some more optimization for Fermi and Titan kernels. - November 14th brings a performance boost for Compute 3.5 cards: nVidia GTX 780, 780Ti, Titan and GT 640 (GK208 chip) Note that the -C option isn't needed for the Titan kernel. - the November 1st release finally fixes the stratum protocol hang for good. Root cause analysis: The ssize_t didn't wasn't a signed type in my Windows port, causing the stratum_send_line function to enter an infinite loop whenever the connection was lost, while holding the socket mutex. - the October 10th release may fix some infrequent hanging in the stratum protocol. Or maybe not. Please test. I also turned of the parallel SHA256 computations on the CPU because they seem to load the CPU a little more in most cases. use -H 1 to get the previous behavior. - the July 13th release adds support for the Stratum protocol, by making a fresh fork of pooler's cpuminer code (and any future updates of pooler's code will be easier to integrate). - the April 30th release fixes a minor problem in the CPU SHA-256 parallelization that might have lead to inflated CPU use.

Modified the CUDA API command issue order to get 99-100% utilization out of my Kepler card on Windows. The old "S" kernels have been replaced with kernels that seem to slightly improve performance on Kepler cards. Just prepend your previous Kepler launch config (e.g. 28x8) with an S prefix to see if you get any performance gains. Works for me! ;) - the April 22th release fixes Linux 64 bit compilation and reintroduces memory access optimizations in the Titan kernel. - the April 17th release fixes the texture cache feature (yay!) but the even Kepler cards currently see no real benefits yet (boo!). Ctrl-C will now also interrupt the autotuning loop, and pressing Ctrl-C a second time will always result in a hard exit. The Titan kernel was refactored into a write-to-scratchpad phase and into a read-from-scratchpad case using const __restrict__ pointers, which makes the Titan automatically use the 48kb texture cache in each SMX during the read phase. No need to use the -C flag with Titan. CPU utilization seems lower than in previous releases, especially in interactive mode. In fact I barely see cudaminer.exe consuming CPU resources all ;) - the April 14th release lowers the CPU use dramatically. I also fixed the Windows specific driver crash on CTRL-C problem. You still should not click the close button on the DOS box, as this does not leave the program enough time for cleanly shutting down. - the April 13th release turns the broken texture cache feature OFF by default, as now also seems detrimental to performance. So what remains of yesterday's update is just the interactive mode and the restored Geforce Titan support. I also added a validation of GPU results by the CPU. - the April 12th update boosts Kepler performance by 15-20% by enabling the texture cache on these devices to do its scrypt scratchpad lookups. You can also override the use of the texture cache from command line. I also add an interactive mode for cards that drive monitors, so you can be almost lag-free when using the desktop. It costs some performance though. In interactive mode autotuning, smaller kernel launch configs are selected. Try not to override this with huge launch configs, or the effect of interactive mode would be negated. Put Titan support back to its original state. I suspect that a CUDA compiler bug made the kernel crash when I applied the same optimizations that work so nicely on Compute 1.0 trough 3.0 devices. - the April 10th update speeds up the CUDA kernels SIGNIFICANTLY by using larger memory transactions (yay!!!) - the April 9th update fixes an autotune problem and adds Linux autotools support. - the April 8th release adds CUDA kernel optimizations that may get up to 20% more kHash out of newer cards (Fermi generation and later...).

It also adds UNTESTED Geforce Titan support. I also use Microsoft's parallel patterns library to split up the CPU HMAC SHA256 workload over several CPU cores. This was a limiting factor for some GPUs before. - the April 6th release adds an auto-tuning feature that determines the best kernel launch configuration per GPU. It takes up to a few minutes while the GPU's memory and host CPU may be pegged a bit. You can disable this tuning with the --no-autotune switch - April 4th initial release. >>> About CUDA Kernels <<< CUDA kernels do the computation. Which one we select and in which configuration it is run greatly affects performance. CUDA kernel launch configurations are given as a character string, e.g. F27x3 prefix blocks x warps Available kernel prefixes are: L - Legacy cards (compute 1.x) F - Fermi cards (Compute 2.x) S - Kepler cards (currently compiled for Compute 1.2) - formerly best for Kepler K - Kepler cards (Compute 3.0) - based on Dave Andersen's work. Now best for Kep ler. T - Titan, GTX 780 and GK208 based cards (Compute 3.5) X - Experimental kernel. Currently requires Compute 3.5 Examples: e.g. L27x3 is a launch configuration that works well on GTX 260 F28x4 is a launch configuration that works on Geforce GTX 460 K290x2 is a launch configuration that works on Geforce GTX 660Ti T30x16 is a launch configuration that works on GTX 780Ti. You should wait through autotune to see what kernel is found best for your current hardware configuration. You can also override the autotune's automatic device generation selection, e.g. pass -l or -l or -l or -l L F K T

in order to autotune the Legacy, Fermi, Kepler or Titan kernels overriding the automatic selection. >>> TODO <<< Usability Improvements: - add reasonable error checking for CUDA API calls - add failover support between different pools - smarter autotune algorithm

Further Optimization: - further optimize the SHA256 part (achieve memory coalescing) - fix a bug that prevents overlapping of memory transfers and kernel launches (this could bring 5% more speed when fixed!) - investigate benefits of a LOOKUP_GAP implementation - get rid of kernel templatization (shortening the binary a lot because each template instance is its very own CUDA kernel with its very own PTX code) - build a 1.5 MHash/s CUDA based miner (3 x GTX780 Ti) *************************************************************** If you find this tool useful and like to support its continued development, then consider a donation in LTC. The donation address is LKS1WDKGED647msBQfLBHV3Ls8sveGncnm *************************************************************** Source code is included to satisfy GNU GPL V2 requirements. With kind regards, Christian Buchner ( Christian.Buchner@gmail.com )