28th of March

Farm news
Weather is still quite hot but had a few cool days where I had the entire Intel-GPU cluster going, but unfortunately not cool enough to get the GPUgrid crunchers going.

At the moment I have 3 machines in the Intel-GPU cluster running Climate Prediction work. They've just released their Australia and New Zealand models. Being in Australia I figured I should be doing as many of these as possible as they are directly relevant to us. I've had 4 files (so far) get stuck uploading. That has forced me to dig out the trusty old file/proxy server and hook it up to the dial-up to get the files uploaded.


BOINC testing
We're still on 7.3.11 for Windows and 7.3.13 for the Mac. Nothing major found, although one bug I reported 2 years ago, to do with putting the manager into a loop, is resolved. Also with running the last release version (7.2.42) and 7.3.11 on the same machines I have noticed that .42 keeps swapping out my CPDN tasks when I have other work but .11 does not which means its resource sharing is better.


Parallella news
They received the batch of 15,000 bare boards and have been waiting on two particular components before they could resume production. They've now got the missing components and will be clearing the Kickstarter backers (like me) and then moving onto the pre-orders. This will supposedly happen by the end of April but given all the other missed deadlines....

Remember the Pi Fan modification I did? I'll be doing a similar thing to the Parallella's when they arrive as they need forced-air cooling plus heatsinks. What I need are some MicroUSB to 3 pin molex fan header cables. Unfortunately the eBay seller who did the ones for the Pi Fan only did normal sized USB connectors.