25 June 2017

25th of June

Farm status
Intel GPUs
Half running Einstein gravity waves and the other half running Seti work.

Nvidia GPUs
The two Ryzen's are running Seti and the two i3's are running Einstein gravity waves.

Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP4 work.


Rpi news
I finished reconfiguring the Pis. There are now 10 Pi3's crunching and one more provides support. Five of the crunchers have a 40mm fan bolted on top of their case for cooling. The other five have a desk fan to provide air flow.


Stretch news
I installed Debian Stretch a number of times during the week to see how things go. I had to reinstall once after the machine I was upgrading from Jessie triggered the screen saver and wouldn't come back. A subsequent reinstall moving the mouse every 5 minutes worked fine.

I also found out the hard way that rc.local doesn't run any more as one of my start-up scripts wasn't getting run. I ended up having to define a service to run it. I also had to set execute permissions on the script and service otherwise they don't run. They used to work fine under Jessie.

I tried upgrading one of the Intel GPU machines however when I logon instead of getting a desktop there is just the wallpaper and a mouse pointer. No icons, no taskbar and no menu bar. I tried reinstalling it twice with the same result so I've raised a Debian bug for that one.

I clean-installed the Nvidia GPU machines. They are all running Stretch now. If you are clean-installing be aware the enumeration of network ports is changed, they are no longer called eth0, eth1 any more.

17 June 2017

17th of June

Farm status
Intel GPUs
All running Seti work

Nvidia GPUs
All running Einstein gravity wave work

Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP4 work


Rpi news
I got 3 more Pi3's. One replaced the faulty #9. I added fans to the tops of a couple of the official Pi cases. Unfortunately I didn't get the hole centered on one of them so that is one case messed up. A second Pi3 (with fan) has been installed and is now crunching away. I will add the other new one into the mix which will bring the bramble up to 10 Pi3's crunching.

The Pi2's have been retired. The bramble is close to 2 million credits of Einstein crunching.


Other news
Debian Stretch is being released as I write this. I will wait a week or two before looking at upgrading crunchers. Jessie is still supported for another year. It may be better to clean install Stretch rather than upgrading them from Jessie.

I tried the GPS receiver on a couple of machines, one Intel and a Raspberry Pi, it would happily talk to the computer but it seems it couldn't get a fix on the satellites. I had it stuck to the inside of a skylight window. Its not weatherproof so I can't just hang it outside. I will try it outside for a short while to see if I can get it to work.

10 June 2017

10th of June

Farm status
Intel GPUs
Running Einstein gravity wave and Seti work

Nvidia GPUs
The Ryzens are running Seti work. The i3's are running Einstein gravity wave work

Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP4 work


Rpi news
It seems there is a Trojan out that specifically targets the Raspberry Pi. Apparently a lot of people don't change the default password. Here is a link to the article: http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/new-linux-trojans-installs-crypto-currency-mining-software-on-raspberry-pi.html

The copper heatsinks from Enzotech arrived yesterday. I have ordered 3 more Pi3's and a couple of cases.


Electricity price increase
My current electricity retailer has announced a 16% price increase for electricity and 9% for gas from the 1st of July. There are a couple of other retailers I could switch to. I will compare them but I expect they will all increase around the same time.

The electricity price increase would mean the Ryzen upgrade (from a 1700 to 1700X) would not be cost effective. It uses another 30 watts for around a 10-12% increase in output. I might have made the right decision about which Ryzen chip to get after all :-)

I have seen a natural gas powered generator around the size of a washing machine for business use but they have a high purchase price. A diesel or petrol powered generator is going to be cheap to buy but cost a lot to run. Its time to look into a solar and battery solution.


Other farm news
My current planning has me looking at another pair of Ryzen 1700's. I have spare cases, hard disk drives and graphics cards for them to keep the cost down. This would free up the i3's for something else although I don't currently have anything in mind for them.

04 June 2017

4th of June

Farm Status
Intel GPUs
All running Seti work

Nvidia GPUs
All running Seti work (after running Einstein gravity waves during the week)

Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP4 wotk


Other news
Last weekend the farm was off, except the Raspberry Pis, due to having to attend an out of town wedding. The Ryzens and the storage server were delivered the day prior to the wedding. Unfortunately I didn't have time to configure them before leaving.

The first Ryzen was setup last week and spent the week running different projects before switching to Seti work. The second machine was setup yesterday and is also doing a range of projects. Performance is a bit slower than the Intel i7-5820K's that they replaced. I am considering replacing the Ryzen 1700 with 1700X CPUs (3.4GHz base clock) but have to weigh up the extra power consumption (another 30 watts). I will also need to replace the heatsink but can reuse the AM4 mounting kit. Each Ryzen also has a GTX1060 installed.

The firmware still hasn't caught up with the Ryzens and Linux throws a number of errors when starting up even though I have a 4.9 kernel installed and the latest firmware from ASUS. I expect they will need a few updates before most of the bugs are fixed.

I've got another batch of 14mm copper heatsinks on the way from Enzotech, so I can look at replacing the two Raspberry Pis mentioned in my last blog post. I still need to look at a better case for multiple Pis.