Altered Silicon Emerges With World's First Ravencoin Mining on FPGA

WENATCHEE, Wash., January 15, 2019 (Newswire.com) - Altered Silicon, a stealth startup founded by crypto mining pioneer Dave Carlson and ex-ARM chip senior engineer Arsen Julhakyan, emerges today with a business model that combines supercomputing and cryptocoin mining – and, with an industry first, the ability to mine Ravencoin (RVN) using proprietary FPGA bitstreams for over 500 percent increase in efficiency.

Altered Silicon plans to sell cloud supercomputing infrastructure-as-a-service to deep learning, genomics, image processing and other clients whose businesses require massive computing power. In doing so, Altered Silicon competes with Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, Google’s Cloud, as well as Baidu and Alibaba cloud services that sell computing power by the hour.

Altered Silicon is proud to launch with a breakthrough – the world’s first ability to mine Ravencoin on FPGA High-Performance Computing (HPC)  processors. Combined with Altered Silicon’s unique data center architecture and power efficiencies, this allows for each processor to produce revenue 24 x 7, even when the servers are not being rented.

“The business challenge of crypto mining required us to look at supercomputing hardware in a completely new way. By using mining as the fallback revenue generator, we can generate revenue any time our servers are not performing data science tasks,” said Dave Carlson, Altered Silicon CEO and co-founder. “I’m grateful to the Altered Silicon engineering team for leading the world in this achievement and very excited about the business model it enables.”

Fitting, rolling, placing and routing mining algorithms is done in much the same way a chip designer creates an ASIC. Implementing the Ravencoin mining protocol required development of 16 different mathematical algorithms and has taken Arsen and his team of engineers months of 14-hour days. 

“I’m proud of the Altered Silicon engineering team for reaching this goal and very excited about the next challenges, of which there are many more to come,” said Arsen Julhakyan, Altered Silicon CTO and co-founder. “Mining-when-idle will overcome the premium pricing problem faced by providers of data acceleration services. The server components are incredibly expensive and we don't expect them to be rented 100 percent of the time.”

Altered Silicon’s specific performance stats are:

-  100+ MH/s on Xilinx FPGAs

-  100-145 watts per card, depending on RVN algorithm target

-  More than 5x better power efficiency than the best GPUs   

-  Altered Silicon utilizes FPGAs made by Xilinx and cutting-edge server CPUs

-  Altered Silicon data processing servers mine Ravencoin with FPGA cards, while also mining Monero with CPU  

-  GPUs and any machine-learning accelerators may also be configured for mining when idle.

About Altered Silicon 

Altered Silicon’s primary business activity is to combine the economics of mining with the lucrative revenue generation of Compute-as-a-Service by renting out high-tech servers that enable data acceleration. Altered Silicon is not a mining company; it uses crypto mining to supplement its revenue when not renting out processors for data tasks such as deep learning, genomics, image processing and so forth. Altered Silicon is a stealth mode company. Founded in 2018, it expects to grow the computing server capacity to megawatt scale by EOY 2019. Closely held, Altered Silicon was founded by Dave Carlson, the founder of several successful cryptocurrency, blockchain and mining startups, and Arsen Julhakyan, formerly a senior engineer with ARM. Altered Silicon owns and operates a 2 MW facility in Wenatchee, Washington, capable of running 13,000 high-performance computing processors.

For more information:

Altered Silicon: please contact Dave Carlson at dave@altered-silicon.com

MVG for Altered Silicon: please contact Max Smetannikov at max@mvgmain.comor +1 646 205 3070

Source: Altered Silicon