6th of March

Farm status
Intel GPU
One running overnight, the rest are off

Nvidia GPU
All off

Parallellas and Pis
All the Pis and one Parallella were running Seti beta work, however they seem to have run out of work units. As of now they are all back to running Einstein BRP4 work.


BOINC testing
We got 7.6.28 for Windows this week. 7.6.31 is also out for the Mac although I see that LocutusOfBorg has already got it into the Debian Sid repository and his own ppa. The main changes are to bring the support libraries up to date (OpenSSL, Libcurl, etc) and cookie-less installing. I did have a problem upgrading one machine but the other 9 Windows machines worked fine. A reinstall seemed to correct the problem machine.


Pi3 announced
On the 29th of February (the 4th birthday of the Raspberry Pi) they announced the Pi3. Its got a faster quad-core ARM CPU at 1.2Ghz but is basically the same as the Pi2 with built-in WiFi and Bluetooth. Memory is the same (1Gb). The price is the same at 35 USD.

They also announced that they have sold more Raspberry Pi's than any other computer in the world. That's 8 million and are still selling them.

While its a 64 bit CPU it can run the existing 32 bit programs as before. They have said they will look at updating to 64 bit mode later if it provides any value. The main comments on the announcement blog seem to be around why its still only got 1Gb of memory and why the LAN speed is still 100Mbit.

Of course I went online and ordered 4 to replace the Pi2's. They're out of stock but expected in the next week or so. The Soc (System on a Chip) is slightly larger so I will need some more heatsinks but haven't found any copper or copper/aluminium ones for the Pi3 yet. Just as well that I am still waiting for the official Pi cases as they will now get used for the Pi3's.