Weekly Status Reports

For the week, I had to present our final presentation. I worked on my portion of the slides, which included work left to be done and verification and testing. I asked my teammates to leave me some things to say so I could present their slides, but Lulu failed to include anything. Luckily, half of her slides were very similar to slides I had made for previous presentations so I was able to come up with things to say on the spot because she had not informed me that she left me with nothing. After seeing all of the interesting presentations that the other teams had put together, I focused in on continuing my testing of the system. I ran longer tests to get a better grasp of the true accuracy (however close I can understand of it) of the decision making process. I expanded my testing to include spreads of more than 2 FPGAs, including 6 boards and 10 boards, changing the scaling up process to 2-6-10 instead of 2-5-10. This made more sense as we can start from an equilibrium state regardless of the number of FPGAs. I also ran tests on the thresholds with which we decide to change configurations to better improve the overall robustness of the system. I came up with different ways to make the algorithm more robust to sudden volatility spikes that may change the configuration and make the FPGAs reset unnecessarily. I also made plans with the team to work on the poster, but Lulu remains inactive, so might have to work on that only with William. I also await Lulu’s response to my asking of her status update on the receiving code.

In terms of my schedule, I am on time. I conducted tests and will analyze my data with better numbers from lessons I learned during my own presentation. Since Lulu is unresponsive, I can only try to keep helping William with the Ethereum miner implementation.

We also have to begin writing the final report in addition to finishing the poster.

 

Attaching a small sample of the many graphs I’ve generated and analyzed

For the week, I focused on the decision algorithm where I started to play around with the weights and seeing how they affected the decision making. This is where the bulk of my time lies. Different inputs have different weights in how they affect the spread. I also had to change our accuracy metric because the way we were measuring the accuracy was flawed. We were at first measuring the accuracy by considering the price changes and the price percent change. This was giving our predictor with accuracy ranging from 80-94%. We are now changing the accuracy rating where we scale up our mining rate and check the expected revenue from the mining pool. We also worked on the presentation that’s due Sunday. I worked on my slides and told the rest of the team to finish their slides by tonight so that we can meet tomorrow and have a meeting where we can prepare myself for the presentation next week. The ticker used for all the data was also reverted back. Using BUSD for the tickets didn’t fix the issue, instead the fix was to keep the client inside all of the api call helper functions so that it would pull the most recent data each call. 

In terms of my schedule, I think that I’m relatively on time, I’m just still waiting on receiving to work so that I can more accurately have testing metrics. It is hard to have accurate metrics to present, but we have relative numbers that we can extrapolate and present. 

I will continue to work with my teammates to implement Etereum and finish fixing receiving code. I know that Lulu has met with a TA regarding this issue and maybe has a workaround. Hopefully she can get this working soon.

For the week, I focused on my parts in scaling the design up to support Ethereum mining. The communication packets are different and need to be stored differently, but everything should be working in that regard. There was an issue with the ETHUSDT ticker for the Binance API where the data was incorrect, the tickers have since been updated to use Binance’s own stablecoin as the second coin in the ticker pairing. This should be enough for longevity unless Binance decides to remove support for their own stablecoin. The historical data comes in through kline data and is processed as such, but inference was not happening with kline data, it has since been changed to use kline data. This allows the added metric of volume of transactions to be used in predicting. I have it set such that when outputting a spread, it will favor choosing the coin with more transaction volume.

In terms of my schedule, I think I’m still overall behind, but in pace with the progress that the rest of my team has made. Most of the work I have to do now has to deal with testing and metric evaluation, which is hard to do without the rest of the project done.

I will continue to work with my teammates to get their parts done. I know that receiving from the FPGAs is still a work in progress that is very important to the communication so I will focus my efforts to helping Lulu with that. I will also work on my own part, perhaps even trying different machine learning models if my team doesn’t require my help. This will also include finding more attributes to help prediction.

I have worked with my teammates to make sure that their modules were working as intended. With Lulu’s sending and receiving functions, I changed it to match the clock that the FPGAs run on so we sync up the communication. William and I debugged the sending part such that we currently have a sending function working and is received by the FPGAs. I have instructed her to finish up the receiving function, which should wait for the nonces from the FPGAs. William and I also found a way to get around the remote server idea by simplifying using github where we push and pull `mine.txt` regularly.

Aside from teamwork, I have found a way to get information from the Binance API that tells us the trade volume, which was one of the metrics Professor Kim recommended us to look into.

My focus for the week has been to figure out how exactly to link together all of my modules. Some components that I had were dependent on the Python version like using the Binance API or how the socket communication was configured. I resolved the version issues and changed the Miner so that it would connect to multiple mining pools at the same time. All information obtained from the mining pool is ready to be sent over, but I continue to wait for that part of the project to be completed. I have been able to link the decision process and communication with the mining pool together. There is a main miner object that connects to the different mining pools, currently 2 of them for different coins on different ports. Before this, it trains on the historical data to have its model ready for inference. After subscribing to the mining pools, it spawns jobs from their replies in threads so that the main thread can sleep every 10 seconds determining when to switch. Our way of switching has changed because of OS difficulties, so it currently outputs its prediction into a file to be transported to and fro remote servers. It waits for replies from the GPIO wires (waiting for this to be done) and sends this back to the mining pools.

I will continue to improve the decision process with suggestions from Professor Kim about using the number of transactions (trades) and integrating more real time data like number of shares found and difficulty. I will also try and see if I can find a way to funnel in the amount of money we get into the decision making process. I know the demo is coming up, so this may take a backseat as I try to help my other teammates to get back on track with what they’re doing, or perhaps figure out the details on the remote server communication.

In terms of the Raspberry Pi, we still need to consult somebody on how to set it up properly on CMU Secure, but currently, we can work on it at home with an ethernet connection. I have since created a module to create the miner and client to communicate with the mining pools. There is a slight oddity with how bytes and strings are dealt with with Python3, so the client is currently written for Python2 where there isn’t as much of a distinction between bytes and strings, which is easier to understand the data that is sent to the mining pool and the data that we get back from the pool. The mining pool in addition to giving work also gives the previous hash and changes to the difficulty. The last step now is to send the data and receive answers via the GPIO Pins. The decision tree has also been updated to include another attribute of volatility that is currently crudely calculated with an average threshold. Currently, I take the averages of the differences of the high and low prices and divide it by the average of the open and close prices. This in some sense gives a metric of how volatile it was from a generalized mean value. All of these mean values are averaged to get an overall threshold value that the get_data method will use to update the label generation. In addition, the decision tree inference currently conducts a majority vote at the node it traverses to, but the vote has now been changed such that it takes in external variables which currently include shares found and difficulty. Future work involves expanding all of these and especially on Sunday and Monday I want to make the modules to hook up the system so that we can push to have a prototype that doesn’t necessarily have to mine yet, but can at least communicate so that we can set up/hook up everything else during the week.

Since the last status report, many hours were put into the mining proxy that we will not get back. The original plan was to use the same getwork protocol that is used in the Open Source FPGA Miner and bridge the protocol connection with the stratum mining proxy. This path was filled with dependency issues and different work arounds since that miner is meant for Windows and relies on root command, something I don’t have control over on the ECE machines and limited by my own resources locally for tools and dependencies. Even when I got the mining proxy to finally run on the ECE machines, the miner wasn’t able to connect to the proxy, perhaps with some ip address issues, so instead of driving more dead hours into debugging this, we moved on. However, the ultimate reason we decided to no longer continue with this getwork bridging was because this was only going to solve the communication problem for Bitcoin. The same solution was not going to work with Etereum, or any other currency for that matter. Instead, I decided to directly communicate with the stratum protocol, something I guess could be argued that we did in the first place. We didn’t because nobody had experience with the stratum protocol or its parent protocol, JSON RPC. I was able to find some documentation about the protocol and some miner implementations that use the protocol. So at this point in time, we have a very basic communication protocol that can at least receive requests from the mining pool.

Aside from that, I also worked on the decision making process, constructing the decision tree and the scripts necessary to gather the data for training and inference. The decision tree is built upon the historical data we pull from the Binance API. I took the historical klines code from the webapp and pulled as much data as I could to create the training file. The data is formatted currently as price_change_btc, price_change_eth, coin. The coin is ultimately what the miner should have mined. This decision is currently crudely made saying that the miner should mine bitcoin if the price change for bitcoin is up and ethereum otherwise. The model is then used every 10 seconds for inference. Work to be done here is to add more attributes for the decision tree to split on, improve the label generation for training, and process the decision more to not output a coin specifically, but a spread of which coins to mine (probably with some mechanism to prevent it from always predicting the same spread).

Setting up the Raspberry Pi has proven to be a little more problematic than I would have hoped. Setting up the internet with my home wifi is worse than with CMU-DEVICE since there is at least some documentation about how to do it on CMU-DEVICE, my home wifi uses some third party that has no documentation. However, I did try to set it up on campus with the guide, but to no avail. I have another plan to set up the internet since William was able to ssh into the pi, but that will have to wait after the status report. Additionally for work for next week, I hope to finally create the modules to send data from the RPI to the FPGAs to finally start bridging between our different parts. I guess as an administrative thing, as a group we finished the design review document and we each also separately did our ethics assignment.

Some inferences after training:

Sample training data (Data Format):

Last week, I encountered a blocker where I was unable to connect to mining pools because they no longer support HTTP and getwork, but instead use the stratum protocol. In working around this, I have decided to use a stratum mining proxy that will bridge the gap between the protocols. This was the result of first researching the deprecated getwork method and postulating how to request work from pools. After some literature review of another project using the same FPGA miner, I decided to use their solution to the same problem. The mining proxy is more generally for testing mining when using a computer as the middleman with a mining pool. However, we want to use a Raspberry Pi as that middle connection, so I also looked into multiple existing miners that either use FPGAs or CPUs so that I can use them to figure out how we want to communicate to mining pools. These include repositories of bfgminer, cpuminer-multi, and btcfpgaminer. For my task to create and test a module for the RPI to communicate with a mining pool, we are still waiting to receive our Raspberry Pi. I also have the task in figuring out web synthesis, but we have since decided to pass the configuration as an input to the FPGAs, so we don’t need to resynthesize anything. I worked on my slides for the design review presentation and provided a script to the presenter. I also began working on the design review report. I am now slightly behind on my task to simulate mining locally because I had only recently discovered the work around, but I have access to the mining proxy now, I just have to figure out either how to get Quartus on my mac or how to sudo on the 240 machines. In regards to other tasks, I am pretty much on track.

This week, I dabbled in many different aspects of our project that also happened to strike a good balance between solo work and team work. In our team sessions, the most important things that William and I did for our group was we fleshed out our communication protocol and choosing algorithm to an extent. We determined our packet structures and the different types of packets we would be sending. William and I also did some research on the differences between our requested Raspberry Pi 4 and the RockPi that Professor Tamal suggested we should take a look into. We ultimately decided to go with our original request and I put in another request for 5 more FPGA boards to make sure we can guarantee having enough boards for our final product. On the solo work side, we had two main large issues in figuring out how to maneuver around the Binance API and how the mining would actually take place, so I decided to research into both of these. For the Binance API, I read into their online documentation. For the mining, I tried to configure the open source fpga miner I found during research, but I kept running into various issues like trying to run windows commands on linux, quartus not working properly, different compiling issues, etc. I managed to work past all of these issues, but I ran into a different issue where that source code used a deprecated way of getting work, so I need to find an alternative to test or create my own before testing. Overall, I’d say I’m on track where I’m a little ahead on some tasks but behind on some other tasks. We also had a team meeting where William and I basically wrote the team status report and delegated slides for the upcoming Design Review presentation.

This week was generally more heavily focused on researching both the hardware specifications of the board we wanted to use and researching the software connections between our modules. It is imperative that we perform sufficient research into this because our aim is to maintain a low hardware cost while achieving the same performance. Settling upon the DE0-CV boards, I successfully requested and picked up some of these boards and located an area in HH 1307 to store them after giving them a quick inventory check. After delegating tasks to the other members, I ended up with the task to figure out how to connect to the Bitcoin blockchain with the Raspberry Pi, to create skeletal modules to perform the communication, and to figure out how synthesis would operate. The  bulk  of my time was focused on figuring out the connection, so only barebone modules were created, but equipped with the knowledge of these connections, I hope to catch up in the next week and create a functional module to communicate with the blockchain via our Raspberry Pi and to outline how synthesis will work so my teammates and I can refer to it as we all collectively forge ahead.