26 September 2010

26th of September

Milestones
Not really a milestone, but I hit 27 million for GPUgrid.


Project news - Orbit
After last weekends outage they came back up around midnight Sunday (Sydney time). Since then we have finished off last weeks run, did another one during the week and judging by the number of work units ready to send we're on the 3rd run.


Project news - Seti
They went off the air due to filling up disk space on their upload server. They are in the process of rearranging servers, but will have to bring forward plans to next week. That leaves lots of work on peoples machines that we can't upload and report. There is no new work available to download.

The fund raiser was for a new science database server. They think they will be able to order it in about a weeks time and then a couple of weeks for delivery. After that probably another week or so for them to set it up the way they want.


Weather
Starting to warm up now we are in spring. Currently the loft is 28 degrees. As a result I have to cut back on processing.


BIOS updates
As I mentioned a couple of posts back I updated the BIOS on Chekov and Maul a couple of weeks ago. I ran around and did the rest of the machines this weekend to bring them all up to the same version.

19 September 2010

19th of September

Milestones
Nothing new this week.


Project news - Orbit
The completed their 1st run of 300,000 work units last week. The 2nd run of another 300,000 work units is underway.

Their server has crashed and the web site is down. For the 2nd run they are issuing the tasks to 2 computers and have a 3 day deadline (now likely to be missed). If not returned in time they will get reissued to another computer.


Project news - Seti
Their servers were off most of the week due to an air conditioner failure. They are now back online.

They have settled on a replacement science server that the fund raiser was for. I have put in $500 for them to get additional disk capacity (2Tb drives instead of 1Tb).


Nvidia beta drivers
They've been quiet for a while but have released new (beta) drivers. Version 260.63 supports cuda 3.2. They also have reworked their installer so that it can now do a clean install and not install certain components. Initial reports say it may be slightly quicker when running existing (cuda 2.3, 3.0 and 3.1) apps.


Cuda 3.2
As mentioned above the new drivers provide cuda 3.2 support. There is a non-disclosure agreement covering it, however rumours suggest the FFT libraries have been reworked for fermi-chips and provide substantial speed improvements.


GTX460
Last week the 2nd one was playing up. When I power up the machine it would tell me there wasn't a VGA card installed. Off to the shop it went. It of course worked for them, so I brought it back home today and will reinstall it later in the week.

14 September 2010

14th of September

Milestones
Passed 100,000 for Orbit.


Orbit
The farm has been concentrating on Orbit seeing as they had a small run of 300,000 work units, which seems to have now been completed. I was also running GPUgrid work as Orbit doesn't have a GPU application at the moment.

The SkySurvey app takes the i7's about 1 hour 26 minutes to complete. The project is set to replicate to 3 computers but the first 2 to return them get credit. If the last computer hasn't started it will be aborted by the project and if it has started it simply wastes its time. Not so good for the crunchers, but gives quicker turn-around for the project.

Due to the sheer number of work units flying around their server ran out of space for uploads last weekend. They managed to find room a few days later so we could upload completed work. Apparently they have requested extra funding for additional disk storage.

They are expecting to present their results in October and test it on real telescopes in mid-October, hence their need for results to be returned quickly.


GTX460 returned
I returned the 2nd card as it was giving errors when starting up the machine. Its symptoms were no display and the error beeps at power up indicate no VGA card found. I have put a GTX275 into Chekov to give it a usable GPU.

Of course it worked for the computer shop, but they are still trying to reproduce the error.


BIOS update
As part of the attempt to fix the problems with the GTX460 I downloaded the latest BIOS and installed it on Chekov. It made no difference. I also installed it on Maul as it has 3 x GT240 cards at the moment.

04 September 2010

4th of September

Milestones
Nothing new this week. Coming up on one for Seti, so I might concentrate on it for a little to get it "over the line".


Orbit
Remember them? Well they just dished out 300,000 work units and a new Sky Survey app. You don't hear a peep out of them for 6 months and then they just put out some work. The latest news item was in March.

The work units aren't too big to download, unlike some other projects. Current estimate to completion is 2 hours for my i7 machines, and they want to be back in 5 days. The last lot had a year to complete. Apparently they are planning on presenting the results at a conference in October.


Maul
Well I picked him up from the shop. He's been transplanted from a CoolMaster HAF 830 case to a CM Storm Sniper case. The power supply has been downsized from a Corsair 1000 watt to a Seasonic 750 watt. I still have to get him out of the box. I'm just waiting for one of the quads to finish off its Einstein work before I do that.


Quaddie trashes its work
For some reason BOINC decided to trash all the work I had on Qui-Gon. I had logged off as my normal BOINC user and switched to another user (to apply Windows updates) when it started up BOINC and deleted all the work units. Why it even started up I don't understand as the box for "always run at startup" was unchecked. When I log back on as the BOINC user its got no work. The logs have a heap of error messages.

Once its finished its Einstein work i'll detach and re-attach to release any work units that the 2 projects think its got. If I don't they will have to wait and time out.