4th of June

Farm status
Intel GPUs
All crunching Einstein O1 search

Nvidia GPUs
The 6 core/12 thread machine have been doing Einstein O1 search until today. Currently they're off.

Raspberry Pis
All crunching Einstein BRP4 work


Pi news
The Pi cases finally arrived this week. They are the official Pi3 case and apart from the LED windows being on the opposite side they're identical to the official Pi2 case. I would have thought they would have a cut-out for the WiFi but they don't.

Pi number 7 seems to be faulty. Its been crashing every couple of days. I've even taken to rebooting it regularly to try and prevent it locking up. I updated the firmware/kernels on all the other Pi's today however on number 7 it bricked it and I had to restore the SD card image. I'll order another couple of Pi3's. One will be the replacement and the other will become number 8. I've only got two spare heat sinks so that will use them up.

And this is what the Pi part of the farm looks like



As you can see its rather messy. I have chrome shelving racks that the big machines sit on and that's the legs you can see (with some spare ones lying across the front). There is another Pi3 out of shot sitting on one of the shelves.


Other news
There is a bit of chatter on the forums about the new Nvidia 1080 cards, which from early reports don't seem to be a great advance, at least from the number crunching perspective. Its still early days and may require apps to update to take advantage of them. The 1070 is due out later this month and we're not sure when the lower-end cards will be released.

We've had a bit of wind and rain for the last couple of days, but its set to clear up tomorrow. That is the reason why the 6 core crunchers are off at the moment. I have to keep the loft window closed and it gets too hot with them running.

I have been doing a bit of research into getting a multi-CPU machine. I am tinkering with the idea of a dual CPU motherboard but the 180 watts of heat to dissipate for a pair of Xeon E5-2640v3 CPU's is going to be a problem. Then there is the price tag.