21st of June

Farm news
Nothing exciting happening at the moment. Just crunching away. I did a burst of Seti work and then switched over to running Asteroids work. There is no sign of new climate models.

While setting up an app_config file to control the Einstein GPU app I discovered there was an easier way to control how many tasks a project runs at the same time. For Climate Prediction I had specified each of their model types with a max_concurrent tag which limits them to that many running at the same time (per model). each type has a separate app that is specific to that climate model. I found that there is now a tag project_max_concurrent that controls it for all types. Rather than specifying each app can only run 4 at a time I can just put a single statement in and tell it to run 4 in total, that way if I get a mix of models/apps it will still do what I want.

They say Windows 10 will be a 3Gb download, which is why I would prefer a DVD that I can use on all the machines. I have read some on-line commentaries saying they don't think it will be stable by the end of July.

I am also looking at the server operating system to bring the file server up to date now that the hardware has been refreshed. On that note I am still waiting for the RAID controller cable to arrive so its not quite completed yet. The shop thinks it will arrive next week after it got back-ordered.


Raspberry Pi's
Q: What is better that a Raspberry Pi2?
A: Two of them!
I have three Pi2's. Now that they are stable, after re-imaging them a couple of weeks ago, I decided to overclock one of them. It lasted a day before it crashed. The default Pi2 overclock of 1000Mhz is too much for them even with a heatsink on the CPU. I removed the overclock (edit the file /boot/config.txt) and its back to factory defaults again. I might try again with lower settings than 1000Mhz. It could also be the memory speed and/or overvolt that makes it unstable.

We're still waiting on Raspbian switching to the Jessie release. At the moment their last official release of Raspbian was on the 5th of May based upon Wheezy. Debian are on Jessie as their release version.