Menu

Supercomputing

@HPCpodcast image

@HPCpodcast-70: Paul Messina – Journey to Exascale

/

From the early days of supercomputing through the stellar success of the Exascale Project, few HPC luminaries have played such an integral and leadership role in supercomputing as  Dr. Paul Messina.  So as we look at the annual observance of the Exascale Day on October eighteenth, we were delighted to get a chance to discuss the journey to Exascale with someone who has led and overseen 10 orders of magnitude in performance improvement.  Dr. Messina’s distinguished career dates back to the early 70s. After earning his PhD at the University Of Cincinnati, Paul joined Argonne National Lab in 1973.  He was involved in building programming language for the original Cray 1. At CalTech, he was the director of the Center for Advanced Computing Research. In 1998 to 2000 he led the DOE-NNSA Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) program which was at the heart of DOE’s Science Based Stockpile Stewardship strategy and a significant catalyst for supercomputing innovation. Dr. Messina was also the first director of the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) starting from 2015 until late 2017.

@HPCpodcast image

@HPCpodcast-69: David Barkai author of Unmatched: 50 Years of Supercomputing

/

Special guest David Barkai discusses his new book, Unmatched: 50 Years of Supercomputing. Dr. Barkai is a 50 year veteran of the HPC community whose new book chronicles the extraordinary progress of supercomputing over the past half century, and how HPC emerged as a “powerful demonstration of our relentless drive to understand and shape the world around us.” David entered HPC shortly after receiving a PhD in theoretical physics and has focused on relationships between applications and architectures.  He served at several technology companies during their heydays such as Control Data, Floating Point Systems, Cray Research, SGI, and others along with stints at NASA Ames and Intel. Unmatched the book is broken up into five decade-long epochs defined by the system architectural themes of “big iron” vector processors, multiprocessors, microprocessor, clusters, and accelerators and cloud computing.  The final part of the book examines key issues of HPC and discusses where it might all be headed. We were delighted to host David and have the excellent conversation that ensued. Join us.

 

@HPCpodcast image

@HPCpodcast-61: ISC23 Postview and Future of IT

/

A look back at ISC23 including quantum computing, EuroHPC, the future of Supercomputing with a backdrop of Integrated Research Infrastructure (IRI), AI, and Cloud, and whether we are living in times when “everybody” is a systems company.

This episode is sponsored by Lenovo.

 

OrionX Download Podcast

OrionX Download Podcast: Future System Architecture

/

Adrian Cockcroft, Stephen Perrenod, and Shahin Khan get together in a free-flowing coffee-shop style discussion of future system architecture in supercomputing. The motivation for this episode started during the SC22 conference, where several advances seemed to point to significant changes in system design and optimization. This led to Adrian’s article “SC22: CXL3.0, the Future of HPC Interconnects and Frontier vs. Fugaku” and a deeper dive in his paper: “Supercomputing Predictions: Custom CPUs, CXL3.0, and Petalith Architectures”. Similar threads were discussed over at the @HPCpodcast. At the same time, the well-received and well-discussed paper “Myths and Legends in High-Performance Computing” by Satoshi Matsuoka, Jens Domke, Mohamed Wahib, Aleksandr Drozd, and Torsten Hoefler, instigated a valuable discussion of 12 topics, from major technology areas to specific capabilities in future HPC systems, to application performance. All of that is discussed here flavored with some historical accounts.

 

@HPCpodcast image

@HPCpodcast-44: SC22 Postview

/

In this SC22 postview, we go over what happened at the show in Dallas last week. Topics include: the energy and attendance at the show, liquid cooling, PCIe, CXL, AI Chips, Open Standards, Storage, Future of Supercomputing, global players, and yes, where SC23 will be held and what its tagline is!

 

@HPCpodcast image

@HPCpodcast-40: Kathy Yelick on Exascale Day, Research, New College

/

We are delighted to have Kathy Yelick as our special guest to celebrate the Exascale Day (10/18). Dr. Yelick is the Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and the Vice Chancellor for Research at UC Berkeley, and Senior Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Her expansive perspective and expertise led us through a wide ranging discussion including the impact of exascale computing on society, the role of HPC in helping set public and international policy, multi-physics research, advancing software technologies, diversity in HPC, the recent RFI from DOE and what the future might hold, the enormous contributions of UC Berkeley to computing technologies and scientific research and how it stays in the forefront, and proposals for a new college. We also touch on a few of Dr. Yelick’s research projects such as Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) and the ExaBiome project and the Berkeley Benchmarking and Optimization (Bebop).

 

@HPCpodcast image

@HPCpodcast-32: The Role of Marketing in HPC

/

One of the most recognized names in strategic marketing and communications in HPC, and an “SC Perennial“, special guest Mike Bernhardt joins Doug and Shahin to discuss the important role that the marketing function plays in HPC. A lot has changed in HPC and a lot has changed in marketing. What should smart organizations do to improve their market presence and build a loyal customer base?

 

@HPCpodcast image

@HPCpodcast-30: DOE RFI with Horst Simon, from System to Ecosystem

/

Following the Request for Information (RFI) issued last week by the DOE, we caught up with Dr. Horst Simon, Special Advisor to the Laboratory Director at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and co-editor of the TOP500 list since 2000, to take us through how the DOE is gearing up to go beyond Exascale. A very insightful conversation touching on many aspects of what’s next!

 

@HPCpodcast image

@HPCpodcast-29: Up Close and Personal with Frontier, and What Lies Beyond

/

The HPC User Forum held a special event at Oak Ridge National Laboratory last week, complete with an opportunity to get a viewing of the facilities (not quite a tour) and discussions of Exascale Computing and beyond. Doug Black was on the scene and we discuss what all went down. Of special note is the staffing challenges of HPC sites, and the brewing strategy about how future leadership computing systems would look like. This is an important topic that we have covered with our guests in previous episodes and some patterns are emerging as we continue to analyze the future of supercomputing hardware and software.

 

@HPCpodcast image

@HPCpodcast-24: Fastest AI Supercomputer, Chips Prices, IBM Quantum

/

Major news since our last (double edition) episode included what’s billed as the fastest AI supercomputer by Google, price hikes on chips by TSMC and Samsung, visualization of a black hole in our own galaxy, and IBM’s ambitious and well-executed quantum computing roadmap. We discuss how an AI supercomputer is different, an unexpected impact of chip shortages and price hikes, what it takes to visualize a black hole, and what IBM’s strategy looks to us from a distance.

 

@HPCpodcast image

@HPCpodcast-23: ACM Turing Award Winner Jack Dongarra

/

We been fortunate to host some of the most distinguished scientists and technologists in the world who have shaped supercomputing as they have advanced human knowledge. Today we welcome Jack Dongarra who was recently honored by the ACM Turing Award for “Pioneering Concepts and Methods Which Resulted in World-Changing Computations”.

Jack Dongarra is a leader in supercomputing technologies, parallel programming tools and technologies, and linear algebra and numerical algorithms. He holds appointments at the University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the University of Manchester, and is the recipient of several awards and honors.

In a wide ranging discussion, we cover the Turing Award, TOP500, the state of HPC benchmarks, China’s Exascale systems, and future directions in algorithms. We also talk about future of supercomputing and AI systems, reminisce about a period where a proliferation of system architectures provides a fertile ground for experimentation, and discuss whether we are entering a similar era now. This is another episode you’d want to listen to more than once!

 

@HPCpodcast image

@HPCpodcast-17: American Competitiveness and Future of Supercomputing, with Dan Reed

/

In recently published Reinventing High Performance Computing: Challenges and Opportunities, Daniel Reed, Dennis Gannon, and Jack Dongarra, three of the most celebrated thought leaders and luminaries of supercomputing have started an important discussion about the future of HPC and its impact on American competitiveness. Readers of this site would know that those topics have played a big role in driving our research agenda at OrionX and have helped shape our thinking.  So we are very fortunate to welcome Dan Reed as a special guest of the @HPCpodcast to go a level deeper. Dan is Presidential Professor of Computational Science, and Professor of Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Utah.

 

The @HPCpodcast blog image

@HPCpodcast-8: Intel Points to Zettascale in 2027

/

After SC21, Patrick Kennedy of Serve the Home online publication got quite the scoop, Raja’s Chip Notes Lay Out Intel’s Path to Zettascale, when he met with Raja Koduri, SVP and GM of Intel’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics (AXG) Group, to discuss Zettascale projections and plans, stipulating a 2027 timeframe. Is that realistic when Exascale has not quite been made official? Tune in and let us know what you think.

 

The @HPCpodcast blog image

@HPCpodcast-7: China, TSMC, and War Games

/

In this week’s episode of the @HPCPodcast, Doug Black and Shahin Khan discuss how global competition around advanced technologies has turned geo-politics into “techno-politics” and techno-nationalism. What instigated the discussion this time is a recently published and widely-read academic paper Chip Geopolitics: If China Invades, Make Taiwan ‘Unwantable’ by Destroying TSMC.

 

The @HPCpodcast blog image

@HPCpodcast-6: Year in Review 2021

/

From COVID to Climate Change, Edge to Exascale, and AI to Autonomy, 2021 was an impactful year for HPC and Supercomputing, leading some of the most notable global technology advances and some of the most exciting business opportunities of our time. This episode is a lightning “year in review 2021” as we look back and look forward. Join us!

 

InsideHPC-SC21-Roundup-20211119i

SC21 Postview – What Happened at the SC21 Supercomputing Conference?

/

SC21 Postview

What Happened at the SC21 Supercomputing Conference? InsideHPC “pulled together a quartet of HPC thought leaders from the technology analyst and national lab communities to gather their reflections”. See the video in this article: Thoughts on SC21: Exascale, TOP500, Diversity in HPC, Quantum, the Metaverse

The @HPCpodcast blog image

@HPCpodcast-2: TOP500 at SC21

/

TOP500 at SC21 was highly anticipated but failed to ignite. Rumored high-end systems opted not to play while entering the conversation anyway.  However, the list is about more than the TOP10 or whether there are systems that should be there and those that should not. Looking at the whole list, we saw a few surprises.

OrionX-News

The Sixth Edition of the CryptoSuper500 List Shows Cryptocurrency Mining Nears $40 Billion Annual Value

/

Inspired by the TOP500 list, biannual list of the most powerful cryptocurrency mining pools tracks compute power and economic value

Press Release

Menlo Park, Calif. – June 30, 2021 – PRLog — OrionX Research today released the sixth edition of its CryptoSuper500 list. The list recognizes cryptocurrency mining as a new form of supercomputing and tracks the top mining pools. Cryptocurrency technologies include blockchains, consensus algorithms, digital wallets, in addition to utility and security tokens. Cryptocurrency mining is a specialized domain of decentralized high performance computing (HPC). This dynamic, highly competitive, and rapidly growing industry has reached nearly $40 billion in annual economic value.

As of May 29th 2021, almost all the produced value is in three coins: Ethereum’s ETH coin, Bitcoin, and Dogecoin. While Bitcoin continues to represent the top spot in mining power, ETH produced the most mining revenue, aided by emerging applications that offer Decentralized Finance (DeFi) or manage Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs).

“We present an overview of market forces and details of the top 45 pools for Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Dogecoin,” said Dr. Stephen Perrenod, OrionX Partner and Analyst and the developer of the CryptoSuper500. “Trends to watch include advances in ASIC-based and GPU-based mining rigs, the end of Ethereum mining, the trend of increasing electricity usage offset by increases in the green fraction of mining, and bans in certain countries that cause hash rate to move elsewhere.”

Cryptocurrency Supercomputing refers to large-scale cryptocurrency mining operations which are typically powered by accelerator technologies such as GPUs, FPGAs, or custom ASICs. Bitcoin is the most notable of such currencies. Cryptocurrency mining via Proof of Work is important since it represents the most effective consensus algorithm to maximize security in a decentralized manner.

The full list with additional explanation is available at OrionX.net/research.

About OrionX

OrionX is a Silicon Valley consulting firm offering Technology Research, Market Execution, and Customer Engagement services to high tech companies. More than 70 financial institutions and technology leaders in virtually every technology segment have trusted OrionX to provide advice, help set new break-away strategies, ignite brands, and grow market share. Visit us at OrionX.net.

* Note: This effort is an analysis of the technologies and trends surrounding blockchain and cryptocurrencies. It is not, and must not be considered as, financial, investment, or legal advice.

insidehpc-bloc

The US-China Supercomputing Race, Post-Exascale HPC Government Policy and the ‘Partitioning of the Internet’

/

The US-China Supercomputing Race, Post-Exascale HPC Government Policy and the ‘Partitioning of the Internet’

“What we are seeing is the partitioning of the internet, according to geopolitical winds,” Shahin Khan, partner at consulting firm OrionX.net, told us. “I also think that we are moving from geopolitics to ‘techno-politics,’ and that the significance of technology in determining balances of power around the world is becoming more pronounced. That means we are in a new zone, a new regime, where technological advances have a much more direct impact on geopolitical considerations than they did before. Certainly with AI and 5g, the pandemic, robotics and cryptocurrencies, with quantum computing, we’re seeing that every one of these technology megatrends is becoming a race for national competitiveness. It means that technology is no longer its own thing, it is central to how balance of power on the global scene is going to pan out.”

OrionX-News

Fifth Edition of CryptoSuper500 List Shows Annual Economic Value Hits New High

/

Cryptocurrencies have reached Exascale class supercomputing, with a hash rate of around 115 ExaHashes per second just for Bitcoin

Press Release

Menlo Park, Calif. – Nov. 13, 2020 – PRLog — OrionX Research today unveiled the fifth edition of the CryptoSuper500 list. The list tracks supercomputers used for cryptocurrency mining, an intensive application that has become a driver of technology development and investment decisions globally. The CryptoSuper500 list was inspired by the well-known TOP500 list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

The report highlights the rapidly growing hashrate among the top six coins mined with Proof of Work consensus algorithms. In crypto mining, hashes are the metric that parallels floating point operations (flops) in the supercomputing world. Cryptocurrencies have reached Exascale class supercomputing, with a hash rate of around 115 ExaHashes per second just for Bitcoin.

The Bitcoin hash rate is roughly flat since the last Bitcoin halving in May, but due to the strong Bitcoin price rise, the Annual Economic Value (AEV) has grown significantly. AEV of cryptocurrencies that rely on proof of work mining has hit a new high of around $9 billion, despite the Bitcoin Halving of block reward in May. AEV is up 90% since the June 2020 list.

“Bitcoin is not going away. Each Bitcoin is worth as much as 8 ounces of gold, and Bitcoin’s market cap at $300 Billion is greater than all but 18 publicly traded companies. There are over 7,500 cryptocurrencies to date, 19 are unicorn-sized, and central banks are starting to roll out their own digital currencies,” said Dr. Stephen Perrenod, OrionX Partner and Analyst, and the developer of the CryptoSuper500.

The annual economic value (AEV) of the top 5 pools in the current list compared to the last list, published in June 2020, are as follows:

  • F2Pool, a global pool with projected AEV of $1.058 billion compared to $832 million in June 2020
  • SparkPool in China with an AEV of $840 million compared to $370 million
  • Poolin in the US and China with an AEV of $736 million compared to $614 million
  • BTCdotcom, a global pool with an AEV of $683 million compared to $442 million
  • Ethermine in the US with an AEV of $654 million compared to $291 million

The six coins mined with Proof of Work consensus algorithms which were included in this analysis are:

  • Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Zcash, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV

The full list with additional explanation is available in a slide presentation at OrionX.net/research.

“Until now, we have been in the start-up phase of Bitcoin, when its behavior was designed to cultivate the market, attract participants, and keep them with sticky benefits,” said Shahin Khan, Founding Partner and Analyst at OrionX. “Everything about it will gradually change towards a less volatile environment as the impact of newly mined Bitcoins coins on existing supply of Bitcoins decreases, and the use of Bitcoin as primarily a store of value and as growing medium of exchange matures.”

Samples of OrionX Constellation Research reports are available for free at OrionX.net/research without registration.

About OrionX
OrionX is a Silicon Valley firm that combines technology research, market execution, and customer engagement. More than 60 companies, from startups to the Fortune-100, in virtually every technology segment, have trusted OrionX to help set new break-away strategies, ignite brands, position and launch products, and create integrated campaigns for increased market share. To deliver the best in market execution and customer engagement, OrionX Research tracks new technologies and market strategies. Technology topics include IoT, 5G, Cloud, AI, Blockchain, and Quantum Computing. With a stellar reputation in Silicon Valley, OrionX is known for its depth and agility, operational excellence, and original content. Visit us at OrionX.net.

* Note: This effort is an analysis of the technologies and trends surrounding blockchain and cryptocurrencies. It is not, and must not be considered as, financial, investment, or legal advice.

References:
Cryptocurrency topics: orionx.net/blog
CryptoSuper 500 Fourth Edition white paper
Top Cryptocurrency Supercomputers June 2020, (slide presentation)
The Brutal Efficiency of Crypto Mining
Article comparing future supply model and stock-to-flow model for Bitcoin market cap and price projections
Overall statistics: coinmarketcap.com, coinwarz.com, cryptoslate.com
BTC: btc.com, blockchain.com
ETH: btc.com, etherscan.io
BCH: btc.com, cash.coin.dance
Other coins: miningpoolstats.stream

###

EnterpriseAI-logo-169

CryptoSuper 500 – Keeping Track of the Supercomputers that Mine Money

/

Keeping Track of the Supercomputers that Mine Money

Supercomputers, which do the heavy lifting for AI, science, and engineering, are increasingly also safeguarding digital money. Unlike traditional supercomputers engaged in scientific or analytics applications, CryptoSupers excel at cryptographic calculations. While the metric for traditional supercomputers is Petaflops or Exaflops (floating point operations per second), the figure of merit for CryptoSuper is Petahashes per second or Exahashes per second.
-By Stephen Perrenod & Shahin Khan

CryptoSuper500-Top-10-20200622

Fourth CryptoSuper 500 List: First After Bitcoin Halving

/

My colleague Stephen Perrenod has just released the fourth edition of the CryptoSuper 500, the semi-annual list of the large scale computational facilities that are devoted to cryptocurrency mining, along the lines of TOP500, Green500, Graph500, and IO500. Like some of these other lists, perhaps some day it will reach 500 or more players, but for now we focus on the top 50. See the slides and the paper below.

This is the first list after the Bitcoin “halving” that took place this past May. Please see my article in EnterpriseAI for a quick description of Bitcoin in general, the periodic halving that is programmed into it, and what that means for the industry. Because it reduces block rewards, we expected it would make Bitcoin mining more challenging and put upward pressure on transaction fees.

This edition of CryptoSuper 500 shows that Bitcoin halving has impacted the aggregate annual economic value of crypto production as we had expected. That metric now stands at about $5 billion, down by about a third. If Bitcoin prices move higher as the long term trend has demonstrated so far, it is reasonable to expect a recovery. The cost of electricity and transaction costs will also play critical roles in such a recovery.

The report also shows that there are now over 5,500 cryptocurrencies out there. Many of them do not use Proof-of-Work to achieve consensus, the computationally intensive approach that we favor and which qualifies it for inclusion in this study. Bitcoin continues to be the leader among all cryptocurencies. There are over a million mining rigs around the world just for Bitcoin, adding up to a total of some 100 Exahashes per second of power.

China has most of the top 50 cryptocurrency supercomputer-class mining pools. In many ways, CryptoSuper 500 and similar lists are a barometer of important national capabilities. As we look more deeply at the impact of technology on policy decisions at the national and global levels, we will incorporate the lessons from all such capability lists.

Here’s the paper
CryptoSuper500-4th-Evolution-OrionX-Constellation-20200622a

And the slides

Top 50 Cryptocurrency Supercomputers, June 2020

And links to the press release:

—–

* Note: This effort is an analysis of the technologies and trends surrounding blockchain and cryptocurrencies. It is not, and must not be considered as, financial, investment, or legal advice.
OrionX-News

Fourth Edition of CryptoSuper500 List Shows Effects of Bitcoin Halving

/

China has largest portion of the top 50 cryptocurrency supercomputer-class mining pools

Press Release

Menlo Park, CA – June 23, 2020 –  OrionX Research today released the fourth edition of the CryptoSuper500 list, the first after the “Bitcoin Halving” that took place in May 2020. The list tracks supercomputers used for cryptocurrency mining, a computationally intensive decentralized consensus process that allows cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum to operate without the need for a central trusted authority. The CryptoSuper500 list was inspired by the well-known TOP500 list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

Cryptocurrencies and their associated Blockchain decentralized ledger technologies have grown in importance as a new asset class. The crypto economy has become an important driver of technology development and investment decisions globally.

“As expected, Bitcoin’s halving impacted the aggregate annual economic value of crypto production, reducing it by approximately 30% to a bit less than $5 billion”, said Dr. Stephen Perrenod, OrionX Partner and Analyst and the developer of the CryptoSuper500. “Bitcoin prices, the cost of electricity, and transaction fees will play critical roles in a recovery scenario.”

Reports show that there are now over 5,500 cryptocurrencies. Most are worth relatively little, and only 17 have market caps over $1 billion. The two most robust consensus algorithm classes from the security and value perspective are Proof-of-Work (PoW) followed by Proof-of-Stake. But only PoW algorithms are computationally intensive processes that lead to supercomputing levels of resources being assigned.

The annual economic value (AEV) of the top 5 pools in the current list compared to the last list (published in November 2019) are as follows:

  • F2Pool, a Global pool, with an AEV of $832 million compared to $1.05 billion in November 2019
  • Poolin in the US and China with an AEV of $614 million compared to $896 million previously
  • Antpool based in China with an AEV of $492 million compared to $768 million on the prior list
  • BTC.com which is now a global pool but started in China with projected AEV of $442 million compared to $1.12 billion previously
  • SparkPool based in China with an AEV of $370 million. SparkPool came in at #10 with $234 million on the prior list

The eight coins mined with PoW protocols, and with significant value, that are included in this analysis are:

  • Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Bitcoin SV, Monero, Ethereum Classic, and Zcash

The original Bitcoin continues to be the leader among all cryptocurrencies. There are over a million mining rigs around the world just for Bitcoin, adding up to a total of over 105 Exahashes per second of crypto supercomputing power presently. China has the largest share of the top 50 cryptocurrency supercomputer-class mining pools.

The full list with additional explanation is available in at OrionX.net/research and OrionX.net/blog.

About OrionX
OrionX is a Silicon Valley firm that combines strategic technology research with market execution creating a practical blueprint for improved competitiveness. More than 60 organizations, from startups to the Fortune-100, have trusted OrionX to help set new break-away strategies and ignite growth. OrionX Research provides an integrated view of the critical technologies of the Information Age including IoT, 5G, Cloud, AI, Blockchain, and Quantum Computing. Visit us at OrionX.net.

* Note: This effort is an analysis of the technologies and trends surrounding blockchain and cryptocurrencies. It is not, and must not be considered as, financial, investment, or legal advice.

References:

###

Lightning-Network

Top 50 of Crypto Mining – June 2019

/

Today, June 14, 2019, we released the second biannual list of Top 50 cryptocurrency mining pools.

We do this in conjunction with the Top 500 supercomputing list that is released twice a year, in June and November. That list has been a matter of national pride for the US, Japan, China, and many other countries.

Cryptocurrency mining is a specialized form of supercomputing, producing billions of dollars of economic value per year.

In the Information Age, money has become information. Bitcoin is energy converted to information and encapsulated as secure immutable transactions on a time chain. This is money in the Internet, that we call Money 3.0. Currently it is primarily a store of value, a sort of digital gold, but it continues to grow use cases as a medium of exchange, and unit of account.

Cryptocurrency mining operations are large-scale, run on clusters, but also consist of highly decentralized pools that anyone can join and contribute their equipment to the effort, for proportionate rewards. Most mining is done on custom ASIC computing rigs, highly optimized for the relevant crypto consensus algorithm.

Using statistics readily available on the hashing rates and block production rates for the large mining pools, we can tabulate the economic value produced by these pools.

We consider only mined coins, that is, those that use some type of Proof of Work algorithm such as Bitcoin’s Nakamoto consensus.

We do not consider coins created with other types of consensus mechanisms, since they require no significant supercomputer-class computation. This includes coins produced through premining, Proof of Stake, distributed Byzantine Fault Tolerance and the like since supercomputing resources are not involved.

While there are a number of lists that provide hash rates and block production rates for pools mining a single coin, our lists are the first aggregation of which we are aware.

This raises the question as to how to compare mined coins that have radically different hashing rates and whose consensus algorithms, although often similar to Bitcoin conceptually, differ in the details.

We settled on the economic value of the mined coins that are produced. This enables us to make comparisons across coins when rank ordering the list of mining pools.

We compare the dollar value of a day’s mining from a given pool, with that of other pools, across the top eight mined cryptocurrencies.

The top 10 mined coins have market caps above $0.5 billion dollars, and the #1 coin, Bitcoin, as of our snapshot taken on May 30, 2019, had a market cap of $154 billion.

When we rank order the top 50 mining pools we find that the top eight mined coins in economic value are: Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Zcash (ZEC), Bitcoin SV (BSV), Dash (DASH), and Monero (XMR). All of these except Monero are ASIC-friendly, and production is dominated by ASIC miners and clusters. Monero relies on GPUs.

For Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin we have used 30 day averages as of May 30, 2019 for block production and hash rates; for the other coins 7 day average data was available.

Table 1: Top 8 Mined Coins (all mining pools, not just Top 50)

Coin

Hardware class

 Algorithm

New coins / day

Hash Rate

Hash units

Price 5/30/2019 US$

Economic Production per Day, Million $

Extrapolated Annual Production Million $
Bitcoin

ASIC

 SHA256

1800

47.1

 Exa

8701

15.662

5,717
Ethereum

ASIC

 Ethash

13,600

172

 Tera

284

3.862

1,410
Litecoin

ASIC

 Scrypt

14,825

352

 Tera

117.6

1.743

636
Bitcoin Cash

ASIC

 SHA256

1800

1.36

 Exa

469

0.844

308
Zcash

ASIC

 Equihash

7200

4

 Giga

86.9

0.626

228
Bitcoin SV

ASIC

 SHA256

1800

2.03

 Peta

222

0.400

146
Dash

ASIC

 X11

1693

1.68

 Peta

172.2

0.292

107
Monero

GPU

 CryptoNight

1934

329

 Mega

95.1

0.184

67
Totals

23.61

8,619

 

From Table 1  above, which is across all pools, not just the Top 50, we see that total annual economic value run rate (extrapolated from the recent average daily values) is about $8.6 billion. About 2/3 of the economic value created is from Bitcoin production alone, with about $15 million produced per day recently. Ethereum amounts to around one-quarter of that at almost $4 million per day. The next six coins add another $4 million daily. Overall around $24 million per day is currently being mined from all pools.

The locations of top mining pools can be multi-country. The next Table summarizes the major host countries for the Top 50 pools; China, the US, and Hong Kong account for 70% of the top 50 pools and almost all of the top 10 operators. China alone is responsible for nearly half of the annual value produced by the Top 50 pools. The Mixed category includes various combinations of US, China, the EU, Russia, or other Asian or European countries. This category has grown as Chinese operators begin to move to other geographies, as a result of pressure from the government to constrain cryptocurrency mining in China.

Table 2: Host Countries, Top 50 Pools

Country # Top Pools Daily M$ Annual M$

China

18

10.717

3911.7
US           11

4.77

1742.5
Hong Kong            6

2.77

1009.6
Mixed          12

2.69

980.4
Other           3

1.18

430.0
Totals         50

22.12

8,074

Table 3: Top 10 Pool Operators (aggregated across coins)

MultiPools Coins Number Daily M$ Annualized M$ Country
BTC(dot)com BTC, BCH

2

3.06

1115

 China
F2Pool BTC, ETH, ZEC, BSV, LTC 5

2.76

1007

 China
Antpool BTC, LTC, ZEC, BCH, DASH 5

2.38

868

 Hong Kong
Poolin BTC, ZEC, LTC, BSV 4

2.26

825

 China
SlushPool BTC, ZEC 2

1.62

592

 US
BTC.Top BTC, LTC, BCH 3

1.47

537

 China
ViaBTC BTC, LTC,BCH 3

1.34

488

 US
Huobi.Pool BTC, ETH 2

0.69

251

 China
NanoPool ETH, XMR 2

0.50

182

 US, EU, Asia
Bitcoin(dot)com BTC, BCH 2

0.34

124

 US
Totals 30

16.41

5,990

We have aggregated, for the top 10 operators, their results across all of the top eight coins, and summarized in Table 3 above. Some operators mine two different coins, others mine as many as five of the top eight. These pools account for, when broken out by coin, 30 of the entries in our Top 50 list. 

The #1 operator is BTC.com based in China, and it produces $3 million a day of economic value. F2Pool, Antpool, and Poolin each produce over $2 million of cryptocurrency per day. These  large operators are responsible for $6 billion of the $8 billion annual production by the top 50 pools. Three of the five largest operators are in China, one is in Hong Kong, and one is in the US.

The winners in this race, for this second list, are Bitcoin, naturally, with BTC.com again as the top pool, and China as the host country for the most top mining pools, including both #1 and #2 positions. Hong Kong has the #3 pool. The US has the second largest number of mining pools.

The economic value of mining has increased substantially. In the first list of November, 2018 we looked at the Top 30 pools, responsible for some $5.5 billion of annual run rate of mining. This new list of Top 50 pools indicates $8.1 billion of annual cryptocurrency creation (even the Top 30 for this list amounts to well over $7 billion).

We intend to update this list again in November, 2019. Suggestions and comments may be sent to: stephen.perrenod@orionx.net

A presentation with the full Top 50 list is available at SlideShare.net: 

https://www.slideshare.net/perrenod/top-cryptosupers-201906v1-149547256

References:

Overall: coinmarketcap.com, coinwarz.com, cryptoslate.com

BTC: btc.com 

ETH: btc.com, etherscan.io

BCH: btc.com, cash.coin.dance 

LTC, ZEC, XMR, DASH: miningpoolstats.stream

Cryptocurrency topics: orionx.net/blog

OrionX Download Podcast

SC17 A Postview of the Supercomputing-17 Conference

/

Shahin and Dan review some of the most important technology advances out there, as seen at the SC17 conference. They discuss changes to the TOP500, New server chips (POWER and ARM), Liquid Cooling, and Quantum Computing. Also discussed: Y2Q, Quantum Supremacy, and Quantum-Safe cryptography.

OrionX Download Podcast

What is new in the High Performance Interconnect (HPI) market?

/

Dan and Shahin revisit the high end of the networking market, discuss what’s new, how HPI technologies stack up, and unveil the OrionX rankings of key technologies based on market, customer, and product attributes. Four OrionX research papers on this topic are available here.

OrionX Download Podcast

Enterprise-HPC Industry Survey

/

In this inaugural podcast, co-hosts Dan Olds and Shahin Khan review the results of a recent “Enterprise HPC” data center survey that OrionX conducted with over 150 high tech, industrial and commercial companies. See the data and find out how these trends may impact organizations’ data center strategies.

 

 

 

Big Data and HPC Convergence

Big Data meets HPC: Convergence? (Part 1 of 2)

/

Data volumes, velocity, and variety are increasing as consumer devices become more powerful. PCs, smart phones and tablets are the instrumentation, along with the business applications that continually capture user input, usage patterns and transactions. As devices become more powerful each year (each few months!) the generated volumes of data and the speed of data flow both increase concomitantly. And the variety of available applications and usage models for consumer devices is rapidly increasing as well.

Are the Big Data and HPC disciplines converging or diverging?

Holding more and more data in-memory, via in-memory databases and in-memory computing, is becoming increasingly important in Big Data and data management more broadly. HPC has always required very large memories due to both large data volumes and the complexity of the simulation models.

Big Data and HPC ConvergenceIgauzu Falls: By Mario Roberto Duran Ortiz Mariordo (Own work) CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Volume and Velocity and Variety

As is often pointed out in the Big Data field, it is the analytics that matters. Collecting, classifying and sorting data is a necessary prerequisite. But until a proper analysis is done, one has only expended time, energy and money. Analytics is where the value extraction happens, and that must justify the collection effort.

Applications for Big Data include customer retention, fraud detection, cross-selling, direct marketing, portfolio management, risk management, underwriting, decision support, and algorithmic trading. Industries deploying Big Data applications include telecommunications, retail, finance, insurance, health care, and the pharmaceutical industry.

There are a wide variety of statistical methods and techniques employed in the analytical phase. These can include higher-level AI or machine learning techniques e.g. neural networks, support vector machines, radial basis functions, and nearest neighbor methods. These imply a significant requirement for a large number of floating point operations, which is characteristic of most of HPC.

For one view on this, here is a recent report on InsideHPC.com and video on “Why HPC is so important to AI”

If one has the right back-end applications and systems then it is possible to keep up with the growth in data and perform the deep analytics necessary to extract new insights about customers, their wants and desires, and their behavior and buying patterns. These back-end systems increasingly need to be of the scale of HPC systems in order to stay on top of all of the ever more rapidly incoming data, and to meet the requirement to extract maximum value.

In Part 2 of this blog series, we’ll look at how Big Data and HPC environments differ, and at what they have in common.

776px-Concept_Mars_colony

Long-Term Planning: The Next Hundred Years!

/

Long-term planning is an art. But it might take a real scientist to tackle a hundred-year planning horizon!

Frank Wilczek is a Nobel Prize winner in theoretical physics, awarded for his work in quantum chromodynamics (quarks, to you and me). He is currently the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at M.I.T.

FRANK WILCZEK, Professor of Physics at MIT and 2004 Nobel Laureate, at a conference.
FRANK WILCZEK, Professor of Physics at MIT and 2004 Nobel Laureate, at a conference

Professor Wilczek was invited to speak at Brown University’s 250th anniversary last year, and was asked to make predictions about the future of physics and technology 250 years from now. Considering that a much too difficult assignment, he modified (re-normalized in physics terms) the assignment to looking forward into the next century.

We won’t look here at his predictions for advancement in physics, many of which have to do with further unification of the laws of physics, such as supersymmetry, but instead focus on long-term planning for technology and his predictions in that area. His paper “Physics in 100 Years” is available here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.07735.pdf and includes both the physics and technology predictions and other speculations about the future of humanity.

Here are some of his technology predictions (quotes from the paper are shown in italics) along with our elaboration, interpretation and reflections.

Microscale

Calculation will increasingly replace experimentation in design of useful materials, catalysts, and drugs, leading to much greater efficiency and new opportunities for creativity.

Computation is key to the nanoscale revolution for developing super-strong yet highly flexible and lightweight materials that can be 3-D printed for a wide variety of applications. And rapid computation is key to developing new drugs specific to individuals’ genetic makeup (targeted gene therapies).

Calculation of many nuclear properties from fundamentals will reach < 1% accuracy, allowing much more accurate modeling of supernovae and of neutron stars. Physicists will learn to manipulate atomic nuclei dexterously, as they now manipulate atoms, enabling (for example) ultra-dense energy storage and ultra-high energy lasers.

Currently, all we are really able to do at the nuclear level is build fission reactors and fission or fusion bombs. As one example, hydrogen fusion will become economically viable during this century, liberating tremendous amounts of energy from deuterium and tritium (heavy hydrogen nuclei) extracted from water, but with lower associated risks as compared to nuclear reactors using uranium.

Mesoscale

Capable three-dimensional, fault-tolerant, self-repairing computers will be developed. In engineering those features, we will learn lessons relevant to neurobiology.

The human brain is a 3-D construct with an extremely complex network and employing high degrees of parallelism, which is key to its processing speed and thus intelligence. Computers as systems are today packaged to some extent in 3-D, but are intrinsically based around 2-dimensional CPU chips and 2-D memory chips. These chips are connected one to the other with simple networks. In the future CPUs, together with their associated memory, will be designed with 3-D architectures, allowing for much faster speeds, much higher connectivity and very much greater memory bandwidth. Quantum computing technology based on more robust qubits, rather than bits, will be well-established, allowing for tremendous speedups for certain classes of algorithms. The image below is of the CPU chip from the first line of commercially available quantum computers. One of these DWave systems is operated jointly by Google and the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility in Mountain View, California.

DWave_128chip
DWave_128chip”DWave 128chip” by D-Wave Systems, Inc. – D-Wave Systems, Inc.. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Self-assembling, self-reproducing, and autonomously creative machines will be developed. Their design will adapt both ideas and physical modules from the biological world.

We’re talking intelligent robots, here, folks! And other autonomous, intelligent, and yes, self-reproducing machines, some very tiny (able to enter the bloodstream for medical purposes), others very large (see macroscale). Artificial organs. Asteroid mining machines. Robot armies (war without human casualties?). The possibilities are endless. Asimov’s 3 laws of robotics will be enforced.

Macroscale

Bootstrap engineering projects wherein machines, starting from crude raw materials, and with minimal human supervision, build other sophisticated machines – notably including titanic computers – will be underway.

Future supercomputers will self-assemble, with limited human oversight in the assembly process. Programming will have much higher levels of machine assistance, with problem statements represented at a very high level. Machinery and vehicle production will be almost entirely automated.

A substantial fraction of the Sun’s energy impinging on Earth will be captured for human use.

The deserts will bloom with advanced solar cells and superconducting transmission lines. Humankind will have settled and begun working in the inner solar system, including the Moon,  Mars, one or more major asteroids, and one or more of Jupiter’s moons (e.g. Europa, Callisto).

Imagine how much has changed in the past 100 years. No one had flown on a commercial aircraft. Very few people had telephones or automobiles or radios. And consider that the pace of discovery, knowledge acquisition and technological development is today much higher, and still accelerating. A 100 years from now, average human lifetimes should exceed a century, based on revolutionary medical advances and ever safer transportation.

We’d be interested to hear from you, what are your thoughts on the state of technology a century from now? Please comment.

776px-Concept_Mars_colony
Concept for a Mars Colony

Back to top

©2009-2024 Orion Enterprises, Inc., Menlo Park, CA, USA