20th of February

Farm status
Intel GPUs
All off

Nvidia GPUs
All off

Parallellas and Pis
Crunching Einstein BRP4 work and Seti Beta app testing

We did get one cool day during the week where I had the Intel GPU machines running, but its back to hot and humid again.


Electrical issues
I had an electrician out to replace a failed smoke detector and a broken light switch. When I went to turn the power off I noticed that one of the two earth leakage circuit breakers was in the off position but everything was still running. Resetting it didn't help - it kept tripping. Its been replaced with a temporary 15 amp one as the electrician didn't have a large enough one (20 amp) at the time. He'll be back next week with the necessary parts to finish the job.

When I powered up the farm I managed to trip the new earth leakage circuit breaker, so I had to slowly go through each power board and try and work out which one was causing the fault. It was a brand new 8 socket one I put in the day before. A bit more checking (plugging things in one at a time) revealed one of the new Intel GPU machines. I replaced the power cable and it seems to be working now, When I replaced the PC I didn't replace all the power cables, I just reused the old power cable that was threaded through the shelving unit.


ARM testing
As mentioned previously we're testing a Seti app for the ARM based devices. I have two Pi2's allocated to running the Seti v8.01 Multi-beam app at the moment with run times around 27 hours a work unit. The Pi2's are running at stock speed. The new Pi2 that I got during the week is running Einstein BRP4 work. That brings the "Bramble" as the Raspberry Pi people call them, up to 4 x Pi2's and one B+. I also have one of the two Parallella's running that same app with similar run times to the Pi2's. The B+ looks like it going for 48 hours to complete its first v8.01 work unit. Hopefully the guys looking through the code will be able to improve on the run times.


Other testing
Apart from the ARM testing I also have some issues with Debian Stretch in that the BOINC log files seem to have disappeared. This happened on the Pi's around October last year (also running Stretch). I will be wiping my Intel GPU Linux test machine and reinstall it in an attempt to work out why the log files that used to be in /var/lib/boinc-client are no longer there. BOINC still works fine, I can see the logs via BOINCtasks running on another machine but where they are going I have no idea - neither does the Linux maintainer for BOINC. It may be related to GCC version 5 (which also broke the Einstein BRP4 v1.06 app and the Intel GPU Seti/Linux app).