27th of August

And here is the news for this week:


Farm news
The farm is running fairly well. I am looking at some machine replacements fairly soon to counter the huge electricity price rises we've had in the last 2 years.

I have two machines (Asus P6T) that are mainly GPUgrid crunchers running 24/7. I recently replaced their GPU's and now I am looking at replacing the motherboards. I am looking at the Asus P8Z77, Intel i7-3770 and 8Gb Kingston memory. This should bring the CPU power consumption down a fair bit. I will reuse the existing bits (case, power supply, etc) to keep the price down.


Project news - Einstein
They have discovered 7 new pulsars. These all seem to be from their Binary Pulsar Search work units. The other types of work units (Gamma Ray and Gravity Wave) don't seem to be finding anything.


Project news - Seti
Seti has been releasing their Astropulse for GPU app. They have currently released versions for the ATI and Nvidia cards with OpenCL support and BOINC 7.0.27 or later.

There are a couple of versions yet to be released that will work with older BOINC clients. Personally I wouldn't have bothered with them, the whole idea would be to give people a reason to upgrade to the later BOINC client. Its not as if they need all the extra computing power for Astropulse because they produce them at a ratio of 40:1 (that is 40 multi-beam work units to 1 Astropulse work unit). Astropulse work units are hard to get normally, now they are almost impossible to get.


Rasberry Pi
These are a small (credit card sized) computer that cost about $35 each. The are based around an ARM processor. Originally developed for the education market in the UK with an emphasis on being cheap. You can find details of them here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs

Well it seems both QCN (Quake Catcher Network) and Asteroids@home are interested in them. They run Linux and BOINC has been ported to them. Both projects are looking at creating an app to run on them.