23rd of April

Farm news
For the last few days Sydney has been hammered by a storm with strong winds and rain.

Meanwhile crunching continues. Its quite appropriate that I am running climate models. All the Intel GPU machines are running CPDN models, mostly the ANZ (Australian and New Zealand) ones that take around 120 hours with a few short models that only take 50 hours.

I managed to also get a burst of GPUgrid work done. They keep running out of their short work units which take around 3 hours so I opted in to the long work units that take 9-12 hours. I ran a few before I had to button up the house due to the storm.


More upgrades
The continual upgrades keep happening. This time I am looking at the file server. It will get a new motherboard, CPU and I will steal the memory out of one of the 6 core/12 thread machines, in return it will get faster memory. The rest of the parts will get reused.

The end result will be a file server that can expand as the new motherboard has 10 SATA III ports (old has 6 SATA II and the're all in use). It has a few PCIe slots (old only has one), it supports disks larger than 2Tb and the CPU power drops from 120w to 85w.

I will update the hard disks at some later date to bigger capacity ones but less of them. It only takes 3 drives to make a RAID 5 array. There is no urgency to replace the existing drives which are 4 x 2Tb.