7th of December

Farm news
Mostly off would be the best way to describe it. Parallella's and Pi's have been running, everything else has been off. I even had them off for 2 days when it got too hot. We've also been getting a thunderstorm come though pretty much every night this last week with lightening and strong winds.

I did manage to get one of the Intel GPU machines to pick up some ClimatePrediction work and then had it working in bursts of 12 hours (overnight) to try and finish them off. They also give me issues uploading and I have to resort to the old dial-up modem to clear the stuck file transfers. They are taking 52 hours to compute and I restrict them to 4 at a time. I have only just now, managed to complete the first 4.


Hardware
The replacement 6 core/12 thread machines are still in the works. The shop got the DDR4 memory this week and the first machine is now complete. The second is waiting on Windows to come in from their supplier. I will collect the pair of them next weekend.

I have been selling off some of the old graphics cards on eBay to get some money towards a pair of GTX970's to replace the pair of GTX670's that I use as GPUgrid crunchers. I am working my way from the most recent cards to the oldest ones as I won't get as much money for the old cards. The more recent ones also have their original boxes so it makes it easier to sell and post them.


Raspberry Pi's and Debian
Debian (the flavour of Linux that the Raspberry Pi comes with) are coming up to another release called Jessie. The current release is called Wheezy. I have been running Jessie on all the Pi's for some months now with them getting frequent updates as it was considered a testing release. My main reason for using Jessie was to get a more up to date BOINC client. Jessie went into a freeze period at the beginning of November as they prepare it to become the next release, some time in early 2015 although there is no official release date.

The last BOINC client that made it into Jessie was 7.4.23 so that is the version we will be running for the next 12-24 months, unless you want to compile your own.


BOINC testing
After the release of 7.4.27 they found a couple of bugs and so we're testing 7.4.32 at the moment. The main fix is to the backup project not working (zero resource share). While that seems to be fixed it won't suspend GPU tasks so there will another version to test in due course.


Project news - Seti
They received some data from the Arecibo radio telescope, only 4 disks worth, so that will be processed fairly soon. They are still trying to rebuild their Astropulse database so they haven't managed to get any Astropulse work sent out yet. I understand they are still working on the back-end plumbing for the Green Bank radio telescope data as well.