24 June 2018

24th of June

Farm status
Intel GPUs
Four i7-6700's running Einstein gravity wave work
One i7-8700 running Seti work

Nvidia GPUs
Two running burst of GPUgrid with Seti

Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP4 work


Other news
I have 3 of the i7-6700's off  while I am running a couple of the Nvidia GPU machines. The sun is out so its warm during the day. I let the Nvidia GPUs idle during the day but nights are cool so they run overnight. The remaining i7's are crunching 24/7.


Power9 CPU
I had a look at the IBM AC922. They sport dual Power9 CPUs with up to 22 cores/88 threads. They can also be fitted with 2-6 Telsa V100 GPUs (way too expensive for me). They are an ideal number cruncher. They are installed in a number of computer clusters such as Summit at the Oak Ridge National Lab and Sierra at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

There are a couple of other companies also selling Power9 based computers such as Raptor Computing which have a Talos II (dual CPU machine) and a Talos II lite (single CPU machine) that is more affordable at $1399 (USD) without CPU or memory.

I'd love to get one or two of the AC922's even if they don't have Tesla's in them they'd make a great cruncher. Sadly while they run Linux out of the box and there is a BOINC client for them in Debian I would have to get various science apps and recompile them for the PPC64LE architecture and optimise them. That is something I don't have the expertise to tackle.

16 June 2018

16th of June

Farm status
Intel GPUs
Running Einstein gravity wave work

Nvidia GPUs
Running GPUgrid plus Seti

Raspberry Pis
Running Einstein BRP4 work


Other news
Einstein gravity wave work has been hard to get recently. They have 2.9 million work units left to complete in the current search but there doesn’t seem to be many ready to send on the project server. That means my computers go idle due to lack of work. Yesterday evening I had one of the i7’s request work for over an hour and each time it got none.

Intel still haven’t managed to get their Neo drivers into Debian. This driver replaces the Beignet package on the 8th generation or later CPUs. Its available on Github but is yet to make it into a package.


Outstanding things
I still need to sort out the i7-8700’s. I just need a PC installer to assemble them and I could then swap out the 6th generation ones. I might have to resort to taking them down to a nearby PC shop and getting them assembled.

I’m not sure how to get a 10Gbe network going. Sure I can get.a couple of switches with 10Gbe (ASUS have a fairly cheap one) but the routers I am using don’t have 10Gbe capability which means they would need to be replaced. Most of the network cabling I have is Cat6 and fairly short which is good. The 10Gbe routers however are expensive. Which one to get and how to hook it up to the ADSL are my problems. I need to find a networking guru to consult.

The other thing on my list is to see if I can get HTcondor going and run BOINC as a backfill for the cluster (just like the real clusters do). My experiments using the Raspberry Pis didn’t work out so I need a guru who also knows HTcondor.