21 October 2018

21st of October

Farm status
Intel GPUs
Six i7-8700's running Asteroids and Seti

Nvidia GPUs
Off

Raspberry Pis
12 running Einstein BRP4 work


Other news
I got a PC assembler out and have now got all six of the i7-8700's swapped in. The i7-6700's that I used before are now decommissioned. That brings the Intel GPU part of the farm up to 36 cores/72 threads. They're slower than the 6th generation but due to the increased core count still produce more work.

With the new machines I also had to install Linux which is easy enough to do when I follow my own step-by-step instructions. I then discovered a slight problem with the way I setup BOINC on them so had to reinstall it on the existing machines. I am now working around a quirk of the Asteroids project server giving some machines the SSE2 or SSE3 app which is slower than the AVX version.

The ECC memory for the file server arrived and has been put into it. There is no obvious benefit at the moment until I get it running Linux and ZFS. That is the next step for it. I may get a SSD to use as a cache drive. I did use one of the other machines and a couple of external USB drives to practice getting ZFS running. Things left to try before I convert it are setting up windows file shares using samba and getting the UPS recognised.


The new router/gateway device also showed up so that is something else for me to work on.

3 comments:

sunk818 said...

Does the Linux distribution affect performance? CentOS vs Ubuntu vs Clear Linux?

Mark G James said...

I haven’t tried other distributions since I settled on the one I currently use. From the Phoronix benchmarking it would appear Clear Linux is usually quicker than most others, at least on Intel hardware.

sunk818 said...

I've got a BOINC farm going using Android ARM myself. Crunching for Team BiblePay on Rosetta@Home and World Community Grid (WCG). Along with old smartphones (old quad core 1.1Ghz), I've been testing ASUS Tinkerbox and Odroid XU4. The ASUS Tinkerbox is solid. I've had no issues running Android on it. Odroid XU4 is more finicky and reconsidering whether 8 cores is worth the trouble. I'm reading some people run 4 cores on Odroid XU4 anyway. Anyway, thanks for your review! :)