24th of May

Farm news
Crunching continues with the Intel-GPU part of the cluster finishing off their Climate Prediction models. They ran out of the ANZ ones. I can do some of the short ones but they download large amounts of data and do a couple of 64Mb uploads. I did some of them but most seem to be resends of failed work from late last year and they fail anyway.

I had the 6 core/12 thread machines doing Asteroids work but Asteroids went off-line Saturday so they are now doing Seti work.

I did try some GPUgrid work but they too ran out of short work units. It seems they've refilled the queue so I will get them running again once the 6/12 machines finish off their work. Despite the cooler weather I can't run both at the same time because the room gets too hot.


File server
The shop got the socket 2011-v3 mounting only to find out the manufacturer uses a non-standard mounting so you have to purchase their cooler. Because they are proper servers they offer coolers for 1U, 2U and 4U rack mount. I have it in a tower case so size isn't an issue.

Maybe they will get it working next week so I can pick it up on the weekend. I will then need to set it up the way it was before.

I have also been researching RAID controllers. The motherboard has 2 built-in RAID controllers that can do RAID levels 0, 1, 5 and 10. These days RAID 6 (or 6+0) is recommended due to the probability of losing a 2nd drive while rebuilding the array. RAID 6 normally requires a chip to calculate the 2nd set of parity bits. I have narrowed it down to two cards of interest, one is an Adaptec and the other an Intel. Given the delays with the file server I have been holding off ordering one.


Future upgrades
One thing will be to update the CPU's in the 6/12 core machines. They currently have i7-5820k CPU's but I am thinking of updating them to the i7-5960x. Another option would be a Xeon as they also fit into a socket 2011-v3.

Another thing on the list is to update the proxy server to something more modern and more energy efficient. It could be an i3 or i5 based machine. At the moment the backup file server (a Pentium 4 @ 1.8Ghz) is doing the job but its slow.