2nd of May

Farm news
This week had a bit of the usual crunching, some Linux upgrades and a hard disk failure. Oh and finalising the file server upgrade.

Crunching is continuing for the Climate Prediction ANZ work units which take about 5 days to complete (each). The Intel GPU part of the cluster is running them. I also have been running a few GPUgrid long work units that take about 11 hours on the GTX970 and Asteroids work on the CPU cores.

Debian Jessie was released to the public along with Ubuntu Vivid. I was already running Jessie on the Raspberry Pi's but they haven't officially updated to Jessie yet. I tried upgrading the Parallella's to Vivid by going to Utopic (14.10) and then upgrading it to Vivid (15.04) but that failed. I had to reimage the SD card back to 14.04 and then update to Utopic. I suspect the kernel is too old as it been stuck on 3.12.0 for quite a while.

The hard disk in one of the GPUgrid crunchers failed after it had been running overnight. Fortunately I have a few spares so its been swapped out with another of the same vintage. I had to reinstalled windows, BOINC and a few other apps. It had a WD Black manufactured in June 2012 and they have a 5 year warranty. The on-line retailer has gone out of business so the only option is to return it to Malaysia. Given the postage cost its not going to happen. I am surprised that WD don't have a Australian distributor or a collection point.


File server upgrade
The other thing this week had me chasing up the computer shop in regards to the file server. I can't get the CPU I was originally after. Intel only shows them being available in trays, which means buying 50 or 100. I settled on the next best CPU a 6 core/12 thread Xeon with an 83 watt power rating. Memory unfortunately has to be ECC and DDR4 so that is costing a bit.

I have also ordered some 4Tb WD Se drives to go into the file server. I can then reduce the number of drives and still have more disk space. They will be in a 3 drive RAID 5 configuration which should give around 8Tb of usable space.