Can I plot and farm on same machine? How?

General Chia Discussion
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Hi all

I’m trying to plot on a GPU and farm using CPU is this possible, How ?

Hardware wise
I got 60 tb disk space in a fast raid 5 array (6 x 14 tb)
The machine is a dual processor e5-2690 24 cores 48 threads, 640 gb memory and a rtx3080ti

I’m running MadMax chia-gigahorse-farmer version 2.1.1.giga22 and cuda_plot_k32 version 2.0.0-6ec48cb

I also have Chia Blockchain version 2.1.1

So the question is how to I plot using the gpu only and farm using the cpu only?

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I’ll be the guy to offer the obvious: plot a lower compression level that’s appropriate for CPU farming for starters. From there, the GitHub (GitHub - madMAx43v3r/chia-gigahorse) has a section on CPU farming about 3/4 of the way down, but I will admit that I haven’t farmed with it and can’t help setting that up. It should be something achievable should you decide to farm on this.

The cuda plotter should handle the GPU part of your mission so that should be the easy part.

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60TB is very little space - just plot this using GPU. and later also farm using GPU.
With 3080ti, You should be able to plot this in less than a day.

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Only compression levels c1-c7 and c11-c13 can be farmed with CPU, so that is one thing.
I think C6 or C13 is probably best.

Do use CPU only for farming, run this in a terminal (in the Gigahorse folder) and then start the farmer in the same window:
Linux: export CHIAPOS_MAX_GPU_DEVICES=0
Windows(powershell) $env: CHIAPOS_MAX_GPU_DEVICES=0

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Forget about RAID array for harvesting

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You should be able to run the plotter and harvester/ recompute server on the same GPU. At least I am using a 3090 to run a plotter and remote compute combined (~0.5PB).
For that small amount of space it should be no issue even using nvme for plotting. You will be done in less than a week. I would also go for high compression and later use the GPU for the farming. Dont go for CPU farming any more if you can reserve your GPU for it.
Of course if you need your GPU elsewhere later, plot the CPU formats as suggested above.

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And create a Spanned drive ?

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Not exactly sure what you mean. I would not recommend to use any shared media like NFS, SAMBA… Plots I create locally and copy them (automatic) into their final place. Harvesters are accessing local drives only. But I use remote harvester connected to a farmer.

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I’d NOT recommend to make any complex drive array
Just plot to separate drives & add them as folders
Why?
The data for mining is not uniq. So no any reason to protect it with RAID systems.
Volume of data is HUGE so no reason to combine a few HDD to one big (cause if any HDD in chain crashed - you will loose the all data array)
Heard, that guys use the free space on each HDD to make a “complex” HDD… but not sure, what happens if that “complex” HDD will crashed. Is it crashed the mains HDDs or not.

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My brother tried this, but it just caused problems, he gave up on the idea after having to replot some drives.

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Windows has a “Storage Spaces” feature, which allows you to pool drives together for creating a virtual drive with the capacity of all of the pooled drives.

I have never used Storage Spaces. But it seems to be similar to a RAID set up.

I searched for information, and watched videos, but they always demonstrated with empty drives.

Perhaps you can take the unused space of each of your drives, and make it “unallocated”.
Then, perhaps the Storage Spaces tool might see it as free space that can be used to create a pool?

If you test it, please reply with your results.

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exactly that way. So you are making a logical disk from unallocated parts from different physical HDD.
& no. I will not try, sorry. Cost of failure will be quite high in meaning of replotting.