Pi Pics

Chris asked to see some pictures of the Pi's. This is what they look like. Not a very good way of handling them, which is why I am searching for a suitable case.

 

 

 

Here is a close up of a few of them, with the top off one case so you can see what they look like.

This is the Simple Pi Rack II that I mentioned previously. Its the best multi-Pi case I have seen so far. There are lots of single Pi cases but hardly any for multiple Pi's. This one has power (via a 7 port USB hub) and a network switch underneath. The link to the message thread over in the Raspberry Pi forums is: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=41669

19th of May

BOINC Pentathlon
As I mentioned last week Asteroids@home were one of the projects being covered in the BOINC Pentathlon. They were the 5th project being run from the 14th to the 19th of May.

Even though I don't qualify as a team I had the farm working away on it. In fact they are still trying to finish off work. They should complete these later tonight even though the pentathlon has finished.


Drobo
I got the Drobo 5N to replace my Drobo FS earlier in the week. I had an initial problem where it decided it didn't like the drives out of the FS, but a firmware upgrade cured that.

Backup times have gone down from a regular 2 hours and 15 minutes on the FS to just 20 minutes on the 5N. Quite an improvement considering its using the same WD Green drives which aren't particularly quick.


Pi
The Raspberry Pi's just keep plodding along. There have been a few updates so I applied them this week to all 5 Pi's.

I am holding off on getting any more Pi's until the Parallella turns up and we can see how it performs, although Parallella is more expensive than a couple of Pi's put together.

I still have not found any decent multi-Pi cases. There was one interesting one where they used some wood and glued HDMI connectors to it. The Pi's stand on their side using the HDMI connector to hold it in place. He had a router underneath the wood and on a 2nd layer had a 7 port USB hub to provide power.

12th of May

Not much happening on the farm this last week. The Intel-GPU machines were running all week, well until the weekend. I went away for the weekend and forgot to enable work fetch so they just finished off what they had and sat idle all weekend. A bit of a nuisance but not worth worrying about.

Its been a bit warm during the day so the GPUgrid crunchers have been off.


Asteroids news
After their recent validator issue they have gone back to using the previous version they had.

Asteroids have been selected as one of the projects for the BOINC Pentathlon from the 14th to the 19th of May. Link to news: http://asteroidsathome.net/boinc/forum_thread.php?id=129


Albert news
Their Raspberry Pi 1.04 app turned out to be the same speed as their previous version. They have now release a 1.05 app that appears to be substantially quicker. My Pi's normally complete Albert BRP4U (Single DM) work units in 47 hours. With the 1.05 app they look like doing them in 31-32 hours. I say "look like" because they haven't finished the 1st one yet.

All 5 of my Pi's are running Albert work at the moment. After reaching my Asteroids goal of 1 million credits I decided to switch them over to Albert to help with their testing.


Parallella news
They have Linux up and running on their first batch of boards. Here is a picture of one running:

The latest news can be found at: http://www.parallella.org/

5th of May

Farm news
Asteroids@home had a problem with their validator. It decided all work uploaded was invalid. The project staff have restarted it and it seems to be behaving now. At one point I had 380+ work units marked as being "validation inconclusive" and then it sends them to another user.

Despite this glitch I just passed the 1 million credits milestone for them about 15 minutes ago. I will now allow a spread of projects rather than concentrating exclusively on Asteroids.

With the cooler weather I am allowing the Intel GPU machines to crunch 24/7 rather than just overnight. My GPUgrid crunchers are also running but only overnight.

Hardware-wise I am looking at replacing the Drobo FS with a Drobo 5N. It is basically an updated FS with the addition of an mSata connector to allow an mSata SSD to be attached, thus making them faster.