30 September 2018

30th of September

Farm status
Intel GPUs
Two i7-8700's running Seti
Six i7-6700's off

Nvidia GPUs
Off

Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP4 work.


Networking
I ordered two of the 10GbE switches which turned out to be the wrong model. I thought I ordered the Netgear GS110EMX but instead I got the MX version which is unmanaged. I might have well have saved myself some money and got the ASUS which was cheaper as they have the same features apart from the warranty.

I did a quick test using the Drobo5N2 and file server and I managed to only get 52% of the theoretical 2GbE (ie two 1GbE ports) that I was expecting so it hasn't provided any speed improvement over the 1GbE switch that I had before. While I can get a 10GbE network card and plug that into the file server I can't do anything with the Drobo's networking.

In other news we had some warmer weather so most of the farm was off and besides that I have also been spending some time working on the Rpi cluster -  see marksrpicluster.blogspot.com for details.

23 September 2018

23rd of September

Farm status
Intel GPUs
All running Seti overnight

Nvidia GPUs
Off

Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP4 work


Networking upgrades
I am looking at upgrading the internal network to 10 gigabit. Its a toss up of getting a cheaper unmanaged switch, the ASUS XG-2008 which gives 2 x 10GbE plus 8 x 1GbE for $349 AUD, or a Netgear smart-managed switch which gives the same ports but costs $90 more.

I have one device currently with a 10GbE network port in it, I have a few with dual 1GbE network ports that are teamed/bonded together. To get link aggregation (sometimes call port trunking) you need a managed switch. In addition to that I would also need to get a full 10GbE switch to plug the other ones into and they are around $930 AUD for the XS708T (8 x 10GbE) or $1800 for the XS716T (16 x 10GbE). There are slightly cheaper models such as the XS708E ($690) and XS716E ($1460) which have less features. The Netgear ones come with a lifetime warranty unlike the ASUS which only has the statutory 1 year warranty.

01 September 2018

1st of September

Farm status
Intel GPUs
3 x i7-6700 running Seti and occasional Asteroids
2 x i7-8700 running Seti and occasional Asteroids

Nvidia GPUs
2 x Ryzen 1700 running Seti

Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP4 work


Other news
Nvidia launched a new GPU chip family called Turing and also the top of the line GPU’s now designated RTX-2080, RTX-2080Ti and RTX-2070. I have four GTX 1060’s so their logical replacement would be a RTX-2060 however they haven’t even announced them yet so I may be looking to replace them closer to Christmas.

I got a kernel update (4.17.15) for all the machines. It promptly broke the one machine with bonded network ports. I’ve raised a bug for that and have to run an older kernel on that machine until its fixed. The other machines with single network ports are fine.