Harnessing old mining rig

[Spiderweak]

Hey guys,

 

My boss decided to buy an old mining rig made of P106-100 (I don't know the price, he probably got scammed but whatever) and I'm looking at ways to hook it up for the projects he wants us to do with it, I've done a quick tour of the forum, found information on how F@H and bitcoin mining work behind the scene, and took a look at the software (seems to run fine in docker containers and should work fine with a regular debian, hopefully), but if you have any advice on how to set up the hardware, feedbacks on these kind of cards if you played with it (back in the days, they are probably like 7/8 years old now) or any comment on these kind of machines, I'd love for you to share them.

I don't know yet what we'll exactly do with it, but I might do some folding when it's not being actively used (mostly to heat the office, for some unknown reasons the building heating is really bad).

Already found some info on reddit on people using their own old rig for that, but not much information on how to set up one, I figured I'd try my chances around here.

Love you all guys,
Spiderweak

[Imakuni]

Those cards are basically Gtx 1060. They're not the newest, but they can still do some crunching on the side; it should do fine for folding.

 

If you have free power, go for it. If you don't, start with your regular, and supposedly newer machines, leave those crunching 24/7.

[Spiderweak]

Thanks for the feedback, I'll see what I can do with it, I expect some drivers issue with it, found good information online on it so I should be able to work with them. I'll try to document things left and write, maybe share a few posts around it with this project for curious people around here.

[Spiderweak]

Hey, quick update if people end up with some free P106-100 and free power and want to do some stuff with it : 

- Ubuntu 22.04 installs smoothly on these old mining platform

- The default nvidia driver (nvidia-driver-390) doesn't work on the last kernel version, but this guy https://launchpad.net/~dtl131/+archive/ubuntu/nvidiaexp compile a compatible driver (which does not work on 24.04 from what he said on nvidia forum, if you want to help him don't hesitate to reach out to him)
- nvidia-container-tookit runs fine without the need for any additional configuration

 

I'll try to run this (https://github.com/foldingathome/containers/) container to play with docker a bit