12 October 2014

12th of October

Farm news
Not much happening on the farm during the day. Its usually too hot so the only things running are the Parallella's and Raspberry Pi's. At night I have been running the Intel-GPU machines. The Parallella and Pi's are running Einstein BRP4 work and the Intel's are still running Seti work.

On the hardware front I am going to get a pair of GTX750Ti's to replace some of the GTX660's. I will also be looking at replacing GTX670's which are in the GPUgrid crunchers. Given I have boxes of old graphics cards I will be listing these on eBay fairly quickly after they have been removed from the machines.

I got a rough price from the computer shop for the 20 thread Xeon servers, they were almost $3000 just for a CPU and then there was the motherboard. Needless to say I won't be buying one of them any time soon. I also looked at an i7-5820k (6 core/12 threads). The price was reasonable. But, and there is always a but, it uses 10 watts more than the i7-970's that its supposed to be replacing and is around the same clock speed. Sure it would be faster and has newer instructions.


Project news - Seti
They've released a new Astropulse application. It does a bit more maths and of course isn't compatible with the previous version. You'll either need to run the "stock" project supplied application or download the optimised versions and manually updated your app_info files.

There is an installer coming but will be a couple of days before that gets tested and released. In the mean time I have already installed it on the Intel GPU machines and managed to trash a bunch of multi-beam work units.

The estimated time to completion is way off while the server works out how fast your computer(s) are and will adjust itself once it gets 11 validated work units, excluding the ones that are more than 10% blanked or otherwise fail.

No comments: