Heat is added to the chamber thanks to seven Block Erupter ASIC miner dongles, which are turned on by a Python script when a microcontroller sends an MQTT message that the temperature has dropped below the setpoint.Įach dongle produces about 2.5 Watts of heat when it’s working, making them pretty effective heaters. , having heard that thermal stability keeps NTP servers happy, used a picnic cooler as an environmental chamber for his Pi- and GPS-based NTP rig. This is an example of the lengths to which Network Time Protocol aficionados will go in search of slightly better performance from their NTP servers. It’s all figurative, of course, but in the case of this NTP server heater powered by Bitcoin mining dongles, money actually does become time.
Follow me for more BOINC & Gridcoin related articles.They say time is money, but if that’s true, money must also be time. I’m looking forward to receive your feedback in case I missed anything or my observations are incomplete/incorrect. I would like to finish with the final chart presenting the number of active Gridcoin members in the past 12 months (Solo & GRCPool combined), which has increased 660% during this period.Ĭhart 6 (source: BOINCStats & GRCPool Stats) With the increasing attention for Gridcoin it will be interesting to monitor whether the downward trend stops in the near future. The results above surprised me because they suggest that the long-term active user-base is much smaller than I thought and moreover it is declining. The trendline clearly demonstrates that the long-term active user-base has been declining in the last 5 years and the delta between first and last data-point on the chart is -112,013 active users or almost -40%. To demonstrate the decline in long-term active users, I have taken chart 3 and added a trendline (see chart 5 below). If you compare chart 4 with chart 3, you will quickly recognise a complete different pattern. During the summer period in the southern hemisphere there are 50000 active BOINC members less than average.During the winter period in the southern hemisphere there are 50000 active BOINC members more than average.During the summer period in the northern hemisphere there are 100000 active BOINC members less than average.During the winter period in the northern hemisphere there are 100000 active BOINC members more than average.To illustrate the seasonality pattern (shown in chart 4), I have created a basic model using chart 3 with the following parameters: Chart 3 suggest that this is not the case and the number of active users is relatively flat. I was under the impression that during the winter period in the northern hemisphere, more users were crunching BOINC projects worldwide than in the summer. There is no seasonality effect in active users The long term active user-base is declining.There is no seasonality effect in active users.It is interesting to observe that the changes in active users are much smoother now, although there are still some variations caused by other projects.īased on chart 3, I had two observations: To better understand the long-term user developments, I subtracted the peak increases related to Primegrid, & in chart 1 and presented it in chart 3 below. You’ll notice a peak in Aug-2014, Mar-2015 and Oct-2016 that corresponds with the same peaks in the overall chart above (chart 1). To explain this, I have included the chart of active users for below (chart 2). While analysing the developments in individual projects, it became apparent that a number of projects were responsible for the main peaks. It seemed more like temporary increases of active users that dropped again after a few months. While looking at the first chart, I noticed several strange peaks which I couldn’t explain with the seasonality effect. Unfortunately there are no daily snapshots on the Wayback Machine, which means the chart looks a bit choppy at times but overall there were enough data points to provide some insides in the developments. Because these stats are not available on BOINCStats, I decided to use the Wayback Machine to build them myself to check these developments.Ĭhart 1 presents the number of active BOINC users without ASICS in the last 5 years. In the past 6 months, I have been involved in several discussions about the trends in active BOINC users and how this is developing in time.
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