25 December 2017

Christmas Day 2017

Farm Status
Intel GPUs
All running Einstein Gamma Ray search

Nvidia GPUs
Off but did a burst of Asteroids work during the week.

Raspberry Pis
Six with fans are running non-stop. The others have been off during the week


Pi to the Power of 4 case
I did another version of my Pi Case - The Mark I. Currently waiting on parts so I can assemble them. I had 3 printed off in one go which dropped the unit price to $177 AUD. Once I have one assembled I will put up photos. One project finished this year.


Other Projects
One of the projects for next year is to sort out an air conditioned computer room so we can crunch 24/7. I’ll probably leave the Raspberry Pis at home but the rest of the farm can be relocated.

Another half-started project is the storage server. Its sitting in its box in the lounge. As its quite heavy it hasn’t made it upstairs yet. I have drives for it. I will probably put a mix of fast HDD’s and slower but larger capacity HDD’s. The idea is it will run ZFS which has the concept of drive pools.

A third project to look at is improved network speeds. I added a 10Gbe network card to the storage server. I probably need another one for the proxy server. I need a 10Gbe switch. The number crunchers can use a gigabit switch with 10Gbe uplinks. I haven’t done anything with this so far as it depends a lot on projects one and two.

09 December 2017

Pi ^4 Case Prototype

Here is a prototype Raspberry Pi case that I designed and had 3D printed. I already have some ideas for further refinement.

Update: Changed the name to save confusion with other products.

Top piece/Top view




Top piece/Front view



Top and bottom/Front view



Top and bottom


Top and bottom/Top view


Top piece with one fan mounted



Top piece with all four fans mounted



Bottom section with 4 Pis and power cables




Powered up and running


9th of December

Farm status
Intel GPUs
Running Einstein gravity wave work overnight

Nvidia GPUs
Off

Raspberry Pis
Running Einstein BRP4 work


Other news
Seti had a fund raiser to cover the cost of a server to store data from the Parkes radio telescope (approx. $34,000) and for a GPU development system (approx. $10,000). What was different about this one, apart from being for data from here in Australia, there were three donors who were matching/doubling any donations so only 1/6th of the amount needed to be reached. They hit the required target within 24 hours. I made a donation of course.

Einstein gravity wave work was split into Hi and Lo work units. The Hi ones use a fair bit of memory and were sent to fast hosts like my i7-6700's and the Lo went to slower hosts and use less memory. My Ryzen 1700's were considered as a slower hosts. Einstein finished processing all their Hi work so have now opened up the remaining Lo work units to all hosts. I've been crunching these overnight as my i7's can do them in 6-8 hours when running on all cores.

02 December 2017

2nd of December

Farm status
Intel GPUs
All off.

Nvidia GPUs
All running Asteroids work

Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP4 work


Farm news
Everything except the Pis have been off for the last fortnight. It was hot today too, until the rain arrived and cooled things down enough to be able to get the Ryzen’s going. I really need to find an air conditioned computer room somewhere but then electricity costs a lot. Maybe a solar/battery setup would be a better solution.


Pi case
The Pi case hasn’t turned up yet. It should have been printed last week. I will chase the 3D printing place next week. As we’re getting close to the Christmas holidays I want to try and get the prototype running so that I can tweak the design before the end of the year.

I am told if one wanted to make them by injection moulding that it would cost around $20,000 to get mounds made. I would need to sell an awful lot of them or charge $100 each to break even. The 3D printing is costing $209 for a single case. I might be able to reduce that by printing two at a time.