9th of October

Farm Status
Intel GPUs
Running Seti work overnight

Nvidia GPUs
Off

Raspberry Pis
Running Einstein BRP4 work


Pi news
For the last few weeks I have been running the optimised Raspberry Pi app and having all sorts of issues. I have taken all 9 of the Pi3's back to Jessie (from Stretch) because tasks take around 1/3rd longer under Stretch.

The in-place app has issues, however the out-of-place app seems to work fine. The drawback with the out-of-place app is it needs more memory and so I am limited to running 3 tasks at a time to fit within the 1Gb of memory the Pi3 has.

Stock app approx 42k seconds per task x 4
In-place app approx. 23.7k seconds per tasks x 4
Out-of-place app approx. 18.8k seconds per task x 3

The author of the optimised app is looking into the issues with the in-place. Hopefully we'll get it working and it will be the app of choice.

In other Pi-related news our Raspberry Pi team quietly crossed the magic number of 3.14 million credits. I was hoping we might have got a mention on the official Raspberry Pi blog or Magpi (their magazine) but we haven't so far.

I am also trying to sketch together a design for a Pi rack as I am annoyed with the Pi's being scattered around one corner of my computer room. The idea is to get the drawings done in some CAD software that can then be used by a 3D printer to make most of the parts. More on this once I've made some progress. I do have rough hand-drawn ones but need to get it done properly.


Non-Pi news
GPUgrid is having issues with providing sufficient tasks to keep all the crunchers busy. They are also awaiting the release of the CUDA 8.5 toolkit. The CUDA 8.0 toolkit was released about a week ago so I am not sure how long it will take before 8.5 becomes publicly available.

CPDN had a bunch of new Weather at Home2 models but they seem to have all disappeared at the moment as is typical with them - Lots of tasks then none.

I'm still trying to get Seti credits up to the same level as Einstein and Asteroids (35 million and 34.5 million respectively). Unfortunately Seti doesn't give as much credit as the other two projects so it takes longer to get to the same level. Seti has been giving out a lot of noisy work units recently that finish with an overflow error in 3 seconds flat.

The weather is getting increasingly warmer and so its harder to run the farm 24/7. At the moment I am running work overnight only.