Mining Software

There are two types of miners that are options for external mining:

• CPU
• GPU-CUDA

GPUs have a more specialized and specific architecture than CPUs, making them faster for mining and increases the potential AION reward. However, the specific hardware required for GPU-CUDA mining (NVIDIA 387.34+) may require separate installation onto your machine, and thus CPU mining may be more convenient.

CPU Miner

For testing only: The CPU miner is for testing and developing on the test network only. Do not use this miner on the main network or in a production environment. It will not work.

Prerequisities

You will need:

• Ubuntu 16.04 or a later version (installation tutorial here)
• Aion node

Setup

1. Download the the pre-built CPU miner binary aionminer_CPU.tar.bz2 from the aion_miner release page
2. Extract the folder to your desired location
3. Open terminal and run aionminer with the desired parameter values:

CPU Usage: We recommend that you allocate between 25% - 75% of your system's total number of CPUs.

Please refer to the above CPU Miner Parameters. The following example will run the AION CPU miner with 4 threads connecting to a mining pool running locally, listening on port 3333 for incoming connections:

./aionminer -t 4 -l 127.0.0.1:3333 -u {0xacc}

Running a Benchmark on your CPU

The default benchmark will assess the performance of your CPU configuration by running 200 blocks.

This example will run a benchmark on your CPU using a single thread:

./aionminer -b -t 1

GPU-CUDA Miner

Windows and Alternative Linux Distributions: This external miner assumes you will be mining with a Linux Ubuntu machine. Our community has developed other mining software compatible with both Windows and other Linux distributions. Links can be found in our external resources section.

Prerequisites

You will need:

• Ubuntu 16.04 or a later version (installation tutorial here)
• Aion node
• CUDA 9.0 compatible driver (NVIDIA 387.34+)

Setup

1. Download the pre-built GPU miner binary aionminer_CUDA.tar.bz2 from the aion_miner release page
2. Extract the aionminer folder to the desired location
3. Run the aionminer file with the desired parameter values:

Please refer to the above GPU-CUDA Miner Parameters. The following example will run the AION CUDA miner with 64 blocks and 64 threads per block on device 0 using solver version 1 (CUDA Tromp):

./aionminer -cd 0 -cv 1 -cb 64 -ct 64 -u {0xacc}

Running a benchmark on your GPU

This step is optional: The benchmark will assess the performance of your GPU configuration by running 200 blocks.

This example will run a benchmark on your GPU using 64 blocks and 64 threads per block on device 0 and the CUDA-Tromp solver:

./aionminer -cd 0 -cv 1 -cb 64 -ct 64 -b

Test Miner

For mining on the Testnet (Mastery) network, or a local development environment.

Prerequisites

You will need:

• Ubuntu 16.04 or a later version (installation tutorial here)
• Aion node

Setup

The internal miner runs on the local node and is provided with the kernel. It can be configured by modifying the config.xml file in the aion/config/. To setup internal mining, update the following fields in the consensus section:

Once the config file has been updated and saved, re-launch the kernel to run the new settings. Mining is normally delayed 10 seconds to allow sufficient time for the kernel to fully start.

An example configuration for the consensus section:

{
  "codes": [
    {
      "code": "<consensus>\n  <mining>true</mining>\n  <miner-address>0xa0----------------your-account-address--------------------------</miner-address>\n  <cpu-mine-threads>2</cpu-mine-threads>\n  <extra-data>MyAion</extra-data>\n<consensus>",
      "language": "xml"
    }
  ]
}

Configure File: More information on the sections of the config.xml file can be found on the GitHub repository.