13 January 2019

13th of January

Farm status
Intel GPUs
Off. Have been doing bursts of Einstein work overnight

Nvidia GPUs
Off

Raspberry Pis
Idle. Have been doing bursts of Einstein work overnight


Other news
Parts were ordered last year for the Proxy server, but the CPU got back-ordered. The CPU has now been changed from an i3-8300 to an i3-8100 as they are in stock. The parts are supposed to arrive next week.

Linus Tech Tips did a video called "Using 6000 CPU cores for Science" which was about the LIGO gravity wave detectors. Unfortunately they didn't cover the Einstein project and how we process the data. The link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCuKuUgNfjA

The weather is effecting processing or work so I am down to turning machines on in the evening, doing a burst of work and powering them off the following morning.


New GPU announcements
As expected Nvidia announced a RTX 2060 graphics card at CES 2019. The specs look quite good apart from the fact the Turing GPU's and the Einstein GPU apps won't work together. They also announced a GTX 1160 which is basically the same card without the Ray Tracing and Tensor cores. We'll have to wait for some of these to come to market but they sound like a better alternative for number crunching.

AMD also announced a Vega VII graphics card which could be useful for number crunching. It was targeted to the gamers and comes with 16GB of video memory. Its built using 7 nanometer fabrication so hopefully won't use too much power.

I expect I will be replacing GPUs in the 1st quarter of this year so now its just a matter of finding the right one to pick.