13 September 2014

13th of September

Farm news
Still crunching for Seti. Total credits are now above 23 million however daily output has taken a hit. We had a few warm days this week so I have had to stop two of the Nvidia GPU machines and limit the other one to running overnight.


BOINC testing
We got 7.4.21 during the week. Not much change from .18 which I had on all the windows machines. A couple of tweaks with the manager and some more work on the installer. This version is a release candidate so its getting close to being released.


Raspberry Pi news
The case for the B+ arrived so I have now got it running. That takes the Pi part of the farm up to 6 of them. 5 are the B version and one B+ version. Speed-wise its identical to the others as they use the same SoC (System on a Chip).


I had a fair bit of trouble getting it going. It seems my image that I run on all the B versions wouldn't work so I had to download the latest from raspberrypi.org and then plug in a screen, keyboard and mouse. I then upgraded it to Debian Jessie (the release version is still Debian Wheezy) and then cull off most of the junk they give you with it. They seem to be bundling the Wolfram Engine which was quite large.

As an experiment I tried to get rid of x11 completely, which also took out BOINC. I then went to reinstall BOINC which decided it wanted to bring back a number of x11 libraries as dependancies. Given I don't use the manager I don't need a GUI and x11 takes up a lot of space.

Having got the B+ up and running I noticed it managed to get a kernel update to 3.12.28+ #709, a firmware update and BOINC 7.4.18, so I then ran around updating all the B versions. The dist-upgrade takes around an hour and a half for each Pi. These later versions seem to be a bit more stable.


Oh and that is little something I put together to try and organise the Pi's. Its just a piece of wood with a bunch of screws to clip the Pi's onto. The white Pi with the fan isn't on here because the case doesn't have any mounting holes. I still need to organise the cables but its better than hanging them by their network cables.

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