07 July 2018

7th of July

Farm status
Intel GPUs
3 running Einstein gravity wave work
2 running Asteroids and Seti work

Nvidia GPUs
All off

Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP4 work


Hardware updates
I got another of the i7-8700’s installed this week. It replaces an i7-6700. I ended up taking it to a local PC shop. They didn’t do a good job. They left the front case fan unplugged and the power wiring for the motherboard wasn’t passed through the back as its supposed to. I fixed the case fan up myself, it just needed the two rear fans to be on a Y splitter so there was a fan header free on the motherboard for the front case fan. When I feel inclined I will fix up the power wiring, meanwhile its crunching away.

The plan is to replace my eight i7-6700’s (4 cores/8 threads) with six i7-8700’s (6 cores/12 threads). That grows the core count while reducing the number of physical machines. Two have been swapped out already. The rest just need an on-site PC assembler.


Software updates
We got an updated Linux kernel in stretch-backports. It installed fine on one of the Intel GPU machines. When I went to install it on one of the Nvidia GPU machines however It wouldn’t boot. It left a blank screen and I couldn’t ssh into it. I had to boot using the older kernel. There is a Debian bug raised for it (901919). They have since resolved it by patching the Nvidia drivers, but they haven’t yet made it to stretch-backports.

2 comments:

N said...

hi Mark,

Just a quick question, How many hrs does you pi crunch work unit? Do you need a small fan to dissipate the heat from the Pi or just using the factory heat sink?

Mark G James said...

The Einstein BRP4 work units are taking around 11hous, 20 minutes. Seti multibeam are about 11 hours.

The Pi doesn’t come with a heatsink, I have to add my own. I also have fans on the case for airflow. The BitScope blades don’t have enough room for a heatsink. See http://marksrpicluster.blogspot.com/2018/09/bitscope-rack-20-build-part-1.html for details.