4th of October

After being relatively cool for the last couple of months the hot weather has arrived. Today its 32 degrees. Most of the farm is off.


Farm status
Intel GPU machines
Two running overnight to clear Climate Prediction models

Nvidia GPU machines
Off

Parallella's
Running Einstein BRP4 work units

Raspberry Pi's
Running Einstein BRP4 work units


Raspbian updated
The Raspberry Pi Foundation finally got to releasing Debian Jessie. Raspbian is the customised version of Debian that is officially supported on the Pi. You can also run other operating systems such as RISC OS and Ubuntu although they don't have official support.

They have yet to set up repositories for Debian Stretch (testing) so I still can't get an up to date BOINC client short of compiling my own. One of the bugs with the 7.4.23 version in Debian Jessie seems to be the size of the log files grow unbounded. Despite setting a 2Mb file size limit I regularly get log files in the order of 38-53Mb and have to manually clean them up.


Climate models
A batch of 12,000 Pacific North West (PNW) regional models were released by the project, so I have been crunching these for the last couple of weeks. Plenty of supply. One of the upload servers was off for a few days and so I had hundreds of zip files stuck trying to upload. The zip files are mostly 8Mb and the final (13th file) is 15Mb for each work unit. They fixed the server a few days ago but its took me two days to clear the backlog. When 6 machines all try and upload at the same time my 1Mbit upload speed just can't cope and nothing much gets through. I had to clear one machine at a time until they we're all done.

Now that uploads are sorted I am running off the remaining work units which takes around 32-36 hours. I've been running the machines overnight when its cooler so they get some processing time. The climate models don't like being stopped and quite often crash if you shut down the BOINC.


OpenVMS
A year or so ago I got myself a second-hand Alpha Server DS15. Unfortunately I had a few issues with it wanting a terminal plugged in instead of using the system console. Anyway I'd like to get OpenVMS installed again and running. I've got discs and a hobbyist license so if there are any OpenVMS gurus out there who live in Sydney I'd love to hear from you.