28th of December 2015

Farm status
Intel GPU machines: Running Seti

Nvidia GPU machines: Two running GPUgrid work. The other two were running Seti yesterday

Parallella's and Pi's: Running Einstein BRP4 work


Farm recap
The "farm" currently consists of 3 groups of machines.

Intel GPU machines
6 x Intel Core i7-6700 computers (4 cores/8 threads) with 8Gb of memory. They have Intel HD Graphics 530 built-in.

Nvidia GPU machines
2 x Intel Core i7-5860 computers (6 cores/12 threads) with 16Gb of memory. They have two GTX750Ti graphics cards each.
2 x Intel Core i7-3770 computers (4 cores/8 threads) with 8Gb of memory with a GTX970 graphics card in each.

Parallella and Pi's
2 x Parallella's (dual-core ARM CPU with 1Gb of memory).
3 x Raspberry Pi2's (quad-core ARM CPU with 1Gb of memory).
1 x Raspberry Pi B+ (single core ARM CPU with 512Kb memory).


BOINC testing
We got 7.6.22 earlier in the week. I have it installed on the Parallella's and Windows machines. I am waiting on it to get into Debian Stretch (takes about a week) before I can install it on the Pi's. The main changes are around OpenCL detection and closing open files.


Raspberry Pi updates
Debian Stretch introduced a new libc6 (C runtime library) last week. It broke the Einstein BRP4 1.06 app that is sent to neon-incapable hosts like my B+. I ended up going back to the official Jessie release to get it going again.

I have an on-going issue with Debian Stretch - the std*.log files that BOINC creates are no longer getting updated. This seems to have happened some time back around BOINC 7.6.12 (October 2015) but I don't think its BOINC, rather some other changes that Debian are doing. I say that because the Windows machines and the Parallella don't have this issue. I did email the Debian BOINC maintainers however they can't see anything in the BOINC code that would cause it.


End of year
The end of 2015 is almost upon us. In reflection the farm has been updated to the most recent hardware available. Hopefully next year we will see some useful (from a crunchers perspective) changes to BOINC.

I mentioned in my last post an MPI capable BOINC would be useful for those who run farms and clusters. Another one I had hoped for was the Superhost idea. I may need to help fund development on one or both of them to get things happening.

Lets see what next year brings.
MarkJ