16th of May

Farm news
The Intel-GPU machines have all been doing Climate Prediction work. Well they were up until this afternoon when the CPDN database went off-line so I can't report work or do trickles, I have suspended them and we're concentrating on Asteroids work now.

I noticed a lot of the CPDN work units taking 165+ hours to complete when they normally take 110 hours. I put this down to CPU cache contention running 8 at a time. I am now running only 4 at a time per machine.

I did manage to do some GPUgrid work during the week. I was also testing a fix to BOINC to do with reuse of slot directories. The official fix will be coming in 7.6, at the moment we are testing the user option settings.

The Raspberry Pi's still haven't officially switched to Debian Jessie yet despite it becoming the stable release a week ago. Hopefully they will get there in a couple of weeks.


File server upgrade
The file server is off in the shop for an upgrade. The shop have already encountered their first problem. As a result they now have it until next weekend. The CPU cooler doesn't have the right mounting bracket for an Intel socket 2011-v3 so they will need to get one in. The case was full of dust despite cleaning it regularly and dust filters. I am taking the opportunity to replace all the case fans. They are still working, its more preventative maintenance seeing as the server runs 24x7.

I still need to find a suitable RAID controller for the file server that can do RAID 6 or better. The motherboard supports RAID 5. Statistically a second drive will fail around the same time as the first one and RAID 5 can only handle losing one drive so they recommend RAID 6 or better these days.