MarkJ @ BOINC

26th of January

2012-01-26T09:36:00.000+11:00

And here is the news this Australia Day 2012

BOINC testing
We got up to 7.0.11 this week. It still has a few things to iron out, pretty much the same as 7.0.8. The manager has annoying button resizing depending on what you click and how big the text is. It also still doesn't build up a GPU cache.

Farm news
The farm has been off most of the week as its been hot and humid. In fact they are forcasting rain for the rest of the week, but at least the temperature has dropped a bit.

I still have a couple of CPDN full-res ocean work units to complete, so have started up that machine in the hope we can get them done by the end of the month (if I leave it running 24/7). I have also been doing some of the BOINC testing so Maul has been running for the last few days.

GPU Users Group
The GPUUG finally managed to finish off their 45 HDD fund raiser. They have now got 2 running. One is for a dedicated Astropulse server. The second is a replacement download server to replace a couple of older servers that currently are having issues.

Given my donations to the 45 HDD fund raiser it will take a while until my credit card recovers and I can consider a donation. It will be directed to the download server as I think its more important.

Project news - GPUgrid
They have introduced project badges. There are two sorts. One for overall work done and another set for work done towards publications. As they do more and more publications its possible to accumulate a number of these. The overall work done images are based upon amino acids and the publication ones are the water monecule. They have applied the badges retroactively (ie we have all been given the badges for work done previously).

I have also made a donation towards them, not much, but I think it important that they get some funding support for the work they are doing and maybe they can pickup a graphics card or two. They are looking at getting their app to work on the new ATI graphics cards.

15th of January

2012-01-15T15:41:00.001+11:00

BOINC testing
We got 7.0.8 yesterday. This fixes the problem with the buttons auto-resizing. They still auto-resize they simply removed the divider bar that was user adjustable. Apart from that its still got the issue of not fetching enough GPU work.

I put 7.0.7 on a machine that also runs GPUgrid earlier in the week. I enabled the BOINC screen saver. My first GPUgrid work unit crashed after running for 5 and a half hours. I am not too sure why but suspect the BOINC screen saver. I have since disabled the BOINC screen saver and its completed some more work units successfully.

For comparison I have 2 identical machines running the same projects. The only difference was that one has BOINC 7.0.7 and the other has 6.12.34 installed. As expected they have been behaving pretty much the same.

Farm news
The weather cooled off again for the last 2 days (and its been raining). That meant the farm can get going so I have been running 3 of the machines non-stop since. They have managed to push past 49 million for GPUgrid, so its getting a bit of work done. I am taking a few days off next week so the farm will be off while I am away.

No news from the computer shop so I will start chasing them tomorrow to see where various things are at.

GPU Users Group
Their 45 HDD fund raiser was stuck on the $1500 dollar figure so I made another donation to get it below $1000. A few other people have also made some donations since then and it has finally reached its target. Matt Lebofsky from Seti@home has posted a couple of pictures of the JBOD in the Technical News forum which can be found here: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=66635

iPad port of BOINC
See two posts back for the link to this. Its been download a few times from different countries, so hopefully someone can make a working app out of it. I don't know how long I can leave it on my web hosting site as it uses up over 40% of my disk space limit, so I would like to get as wide an audience as possible to grab a copy.

7th of January

2012-01-07T10:08:00.003+11:00

BOINC testing
We're still on 7.0.7 so no changes from my last post on the subject. I expect there will be a new version next week as people return from holidays.

Its still got 2 main bugs that I think need fixing before its releasable. The auto-resizing of the buttons in the manager and the work-fetch for GPU (more precisely the lack of).

There is also a questionable decision to not over commit the CPU if there are multi-threaded jobs running, which will quite often lead to an idle CPU core.

There have been reports of 3 projects (Almergrid, BURP and Constellation) rejecting all work from the newer client presumably because of the new certificate structure.

Farm news
Not much happening on the farm this week. Weather was hot most of the week so everything was off. Yesterday cooled down so I fired up 3 machines and banged-out a few work units. Its going to be hot for the next 5 days so I have started powering them off again.

GPU Users Group
They are still trying to finish off their 45 HDD fund raiser. They need another $1,560 to complete it.

iPad port of BOINC
See my previous post. A few people have downloaded it. Maybe it will progress to a working version this year, but don't hold your breath.

Project news - Einstein
They have discovered another new pulsar.

Project news - Seti
They are having some issues giving out work. Its not the network bandwidth this time as that has dropped off and file transfers are quick now. Its an issue with the scheduler not giving work out.

Short-term plans
1. Put another GTX560Ti in Maul. I need to replace the power supply with a modular unit.
2. Get the Adventure 2800 in a case and running
3. Get the 12 core machine sorted out
4. Sell off the old graphics cards (on eBay)

iPad port of BOINC

2012-01-04T21:37:00.004+11:00

There was some discussion on the BOINC Dev mailing list this week about people working on an iPad port of BOINC.

I paid a developer to port BOINC to the iPad. Unfortunately he didn't finish it so the source is incomplete. It consists of an RAR archive containing an Xcode 10.6 project with the 3 support libraries (c-ares, curl and wxWidgets) required to compile BOINC. He did not do the GUI, nor did he complete the code conversion to Objective C so its quite likely useless. I don't have a Mac so can't test it.

You can download from here: http://augurtbbs.com.au/downloads/dlindex.html

Warning: Its 128 Mb in size

New years day 2012

2012-01-01T10:56:00.002+11:00

Happy new year.

I was going to pen the last blog for 2011 yesterday but getting ready to see in the new year took precendence. So where did we end the year?

BOINC testing
we're up to 7.0.6 for Windows and 7.0.7 for Linux. Hardly anything changed from 7.0.3 which I had installed before. Its still got the button auto-resize issue and its unable to build up a cache of GPU work (but it does for CPU). Its still not ready for release in my considered opinion.

I tried a couple of the Virtual Box test work units. The initial download when you attach to the test project is 1.6Gb. They work fine, but there is no screen saver or output from the work units to see what its doing.

Farm news
I put the old 55Gb SSD into Maul seeing as its usually my guinea-pig when it comes to testing stuff. I had to reinstall windows onto it and off it goes. No problems, just a couple of hours spent setting it up the way it was before. I also pulled out the 3 GTS450's and put a GTX560Ti in there.

As mentioned last week Maul was getting rather clogged up with dust (caked on all the fans and the heat sink). So it was off to the shop for a clean and tidy up some of the cabling to give better airflow. Its now looking a lot cleaner. I have asked the shop to get a modular 750w power supply in for me and will look at putting the other GTX560Ti into it. There aren't enough PCIe power connectors at the moment.

The power LED in Maul seems to have died (its gone very faint). I did ask the shop to check it but given they are imbedded in a panel they can't do much about it. This is my 2nd or 3rd CM Storm Sniper case to do this, so its an issue with Cooler Master using cheaper components. Seeing as its such a major hassle to return the case (yes its still under warranty) and be without the machine for 2 months I am not going to bother getting it fixed.

The 3 full-res ocean wu from CPDN that I mentioned last week were finished off and we've picked up another 3. Its about 25% through the current ones.

GPU Users Group
I made yet another donation towards their 45 hard disk fund raiser. The last time I looked they still needed $1630 to complete it. They already have half of the drives ordered so the JBOD we purchased is partially usable. We need to get this completed before we can move on to the next item, which is a new download server for Seti to replace their two existing ones.

23rd of December

2011-12-23T17:25:00.001+11:00

Its Christmas eve eve and here is the news...

Farm news
Nothing much has been happening on the farm this week. I had only 1 machine running trying to get through those Full-res Ocean CPDN work units. They only take around 550 hours :-)

I am still trying to organise a case for the Adventure and its graphics cards. It always seems so much harder once you have most of the bits to get the last few parts. I have emailed some pictures to my usual shop and they have been in contact with one of their suppliers who specialises in rackmount cases.

Maul's heatsink and CPU fan seem rather clogged up with dust so I will take him into the shop next week so it can get cleaned. I also want them to rearrange the fan wiring so the fans don't just run at full speed.

GPUUG fund raiser
The GPU User Group ( http://gpuug.org/ ) are trying to finish off their 45 x 2Tb hard disk drive fund raiser. As I reported before they have already shipped 24 drives to Seti. I made another donation towards it. They need to finish this off so they can get onto the next item, which is an Astropulse server. At the moment they are $2,189 away from completing this one so if anyone would like to donate please help out.

Project news - GPUgrid
GPUgrid ( http://www.gpugrid.net/index.php ) updated their website and wow its quite fancy now and has the latest server software. It will take a little getting used to. Its mostly the same navigation as before but with the new server software some things are different, on top of the new look web pages.

19th of December

2011-12-19T22:34:00.000+11:00

BOINC testing
We got 7.0.3 this week. So I put it on Maul. Its crunching away at the moment. There have been some reports of weird work-fetch issues. I have found the manager has an issue with the projects tab and resizing if there is a scroll bar. Apart from that it seems to be behaving. The transfers tab now shows "Download:suspended". Before you didn't know if a transfer was going up or down when they are suspended. The file transfer backoff's have also been reduced after complaints they were too agressive in the current 6.12 clients.

The main new feature (apart from the task scheduling/work fetch) is support for OpenCL devices, primarily ATI and Nvidia graphics cards.

Not too bad, but not quite ready for release yet (in my opinion).

Farm news
This week has been warm with rain on and off, so I have to keep the window mostly closed, which also means it gets hot. I have had Sulu running all the time but mostly without GPU to keep the heat under control.

GPUUG funding drives
The GPU Users Group still have a couple of hardware funding drives going. One for a new server and one for 45 x 2Tb hard disk drives for the RAID array. Seeing as it was half-way there on the funding drive Seti asked if they could get half of the drives ordered. Various orders were placed (due to vendor limits) to get 24 drives. The remainder will get ordered once the funding drive completes. At the moment they need $2,999 to finish this one off.

The GPU Users Group have also started taking donations to Seti via PayPal. The University is unable under California law to accept PayPal donations. The GPUUG can as they are incorporated in a different state and not a government entity.

Project news - GPUgrid
They have just updated their server software. Some things (like web pages) are yet to be updated. This should allow them to support ATI cards in the future once they have a compatible science application.

The next update planned is to a newer science application which will only work on cards that have a compute capability of 1.3 or better.

12th of December

2011-12-12T22:40:00.001+11:00

Farm News
Well I have been buying presents again. Well its more that a bunch of them turned up today.

1st up a replacement monitor arrived. I have already swapped the old monitor out. It looks a bit clearer than the old one. Its also noticably lighter. The old one will go out in the next council clean-up.

It was followed a few hours later by the extra PCIe bridge cards and cable for the Adventure 2800. Along with the bridge cards came the 10 GTS450's. Even though they are from 2 different companies in Japan they happened to use the same courier company and arrived together.

For the last few days its been quite warm and then a storm rolled in yesterday and the temperature dropped again. I have only been running one machine without any GPU work. Now the temp has dropped I have fired up the GPU again.

Adventure
Well I haven't got a case organised yet. I might just go for a rack-mount style case as they tend to be cheaper and more easy to find with the necessary cut-outs in the back-plane. I need to do some searching on the internet to see what is available.

BOINC testing
No new versions so far this week. There have been a lot of complaints about the backoff being too agressive in later BOINC clients so I have posted a request to the mailing list in the hope we can reduce them in the new version. There has been no response from the developers yet.

7th of December

2011-12-07T21:50:00.003+11:00

Back in Sydney.

Adventure
Well its home with me. I haven't taken it out of the box. I have ordered a 2nd set of bridge cards/cable for it from the company in Japan.

I have asked my computer shop to see if they can find a suitable case for it (they need 12 cut-outs on the back plane for all the cards). I have a spare Corsair 1000 watt power supply which probably isn't enough for all the cards, but might be enough to get it going with say half the cards. The shop hasn't got back to me yet.

I need to decide which machine is going to host it. I have a number of Q6600's but they only have a single PCIe x16 slot. The P6T's have 3 slots (two are x16) but I would rather not use them as a host. I may need to get another machine with dual x16 slots. It wouldn't need to do much processing, it just needs to feed the PCIe bus.

The 10 GTS450 cards have been ordered. The latest email from the company in Japan is they shipped them today.

BOINC testing
Well the 6.13 line has ended and 7.0.2 is out for testing. There have been a few different issues reported for it already, so I will wait for another build before I install it on one machine (probably Maul).

Farm news
Sulu has just completed its Hi-res Ocean CPDN work unit that it had before I went away. Its also finished off the 3 regional models that it had. Since then its picked up another 3 Hi-res Ocean work units. Its also running Einstein CPU work.

I have a couple of machines running GPUgrid work so they should be getting a fair bit processed now as they try and catch up.

My 22 inch monitor has been playing up for the past 6 months. It switches the screen off after about 20 minutes of use. I think its got a dry joint and once it warms up it turns off. Some times it will do this while you are in the middle of using the machine, so its not power management. To fix this I normally just turn it off and on. The power switch on it broke yesterday. It would appear to not push out, so probably broke a spring. Now its on until it warms up, then all I can do is pull the power cable out and put it back. Time to order a new one I think.

GTS450 cards
I have installed the 3 of them in Maul, swapping out the GT240 cards that were there before. They run rather hot, not suprisingly being single slot cards. What is suprising is that they only appear to be a little faster. The peak flops reported by BOINC is approximately 1/3 more (401). For Einstein work the GT240's were taking around 80 minutes and the GTS450 around 60-70 minutes. It could also be a driver issue as I had to install later drivers.

If they overheat they make the machine reboot. I have added an extra fan near the cards to blow air down the length of the cards but it doesn't seem to make much difference. The top most card is 10 degrees hotter than the bottom card. The BIOS isn't agressive enough at increasing fan speed so I have had to do this manually to stop them overheating.

26th of November

2011-11-26T14:36:00.003+11:00

Happy birthday. Happy birthday. Happy birthday to me :-)

I couldn't help myself. I went back to Akihabara and got another GTS450 single slot card. It was in the display case. They didn't want to sell it to me on Wednesday, but today its marked down from 14,000 yen to 11,600 yen as it was display stock and their last one. When the total gets to 30,000 yen or more you have to pay a 5% consumption tax. This kept me under that by buying in two separate transaction.

That brings me up to 3 of them, which I will probably put in Maul to replace the GT240 cards. It should increase its throughput quite nicely without too much power increase.

I have been in contact with Elsa in Japan and they have managed to find some more. Due to some restrictions they have to sell through their distributor if I want to get them shipped to Australia. I will probably buy 10 to cut down on shipping costs. That will give me 8 to put in the Adventure 2800 and 2 spares. Didn't I mention I got the Adventure 2800? Now all I have to do is get them all home.

GPUUG update
They finished the fund raiser for the RAID box and it has now been delivered to Seti@home. They have two additional targets:
a) 45 x 2Tb server grade hard disks
and
b) Another server

I have kicked in a bit of money towards both. I am concentrating on the hard disks as they cost less and they are needed for the RAID box thats recently been delivered.

23rd of November

2011-11-23T17:04:00.000+11:00

While walking around an electronics department store called Akiba I found the rare single-slot GTS450. Its an ELSA branded one, the same company that I got the Adventure 2800 from. They only had 2 in stock, otherwise I would have bought more.

19th of November

2011-11-19T17:17:00.000+11:00

Well not too much to report this time as I am still in Tokyo.

I did order an Adventure 2800 from the company in Japan. I have done the necessary funds transfer. I haven't had a confirmation that they have received the funds yet. Hopefully it will show up early next week as I should be heading back to Sydney at the end of the next week.

I am not too sure what GPU's I will put in it at the moment. I am leaning towards stuffing it with 8 x GT440's. The single slot MSI GTS450's would have been ideal but I can't find anywhere that has any. I still have to buy a suitable case, but I have do have a spare 1000w Corsair power supply.

Going on an Adventure

2011-11-12T19:49:00.002+11:00

Geetings again from Japan.

BOINC testing - 6.13
The 6.13 client got up to 6.13.12 this week. It contains quite a lot of changes. Given my current location I am unable to test it at the moment.

BOINC testing - 6.12
The 6.12 client got up to 6.12.43 which has a couple of Mac installer fixes and an additional field for Virtual Box handling.

GPUUG website
The GPU Users Group have registered as a non-profit organization. People can donate using PayPal and they then use the money to purchase specifc hardware or software for Seti at Home. Their web site is at http://www.gpuug.org/

One of the items they were after was a RAID enclosure. I gave $1,000 towards it. Other people also donated to it, so that it has now completed that item. There are other items to buy such as 45 x 2Tb server grade hard disk drives.

Going on an Adventure
Remember some time back I posted about the LucidLogix Adventure 2800? Well it turns out they sell them over here through a company called ELSA Japan. They are located here in Tokyo. I have been discussing pricing and availability with them. I may be able to get one of these while I am over here.

They have them bundled in a rack mount case, but I can purchase the motherboard, PCIe interface cards and a 1 meter cable without the case and power supply.

29th of October

2011-10-29T17:08:00.002+11:00

Farm news
Greetings from Tokyo. The farm is off because I am overseas.

BOINC testing
We got an almost final version of the 6.13 client (6.13.10) which is expected to become the new version 7 client once testing completes. It sounds like its now stable enough to try this version.

iPad development
Well the developer has given up. He doesn't understand how to install BOINC on a Mac and use the iPad app that he managed to get compiled. I will try and post the Xcode project that he came up with in case its of use to another developer. Its not complete (he didn't do the GUI or convert the code to Objective C) and its fairly big at 144Mb. Its based on the Mac 6.12.36 client.

Project news - CPDN
The project was hacked and some user account details were compromised. The administrators shut the project down and have been investigating the extent of the problem. The project is now mostly running again but trickles aren't at the moment.

They have emailed the effected users to let them know. My understanding is that they were mostly moderators that had their account details compromised.

23rd of October

2011-10-23T22:10:00.000+11:00

Farm news
Well the farm has been running just a single machine for the last week. I have now shut it down until I return. As expected there hasn't been too much progress from a single machine. This single machine has 7 CPDN tasks on hand, 3 of which have completed but can't report. One of incomplete work units is a full-res ocean work unit that takes 550 hours and is about half done.

Hopefully I will have internet access from Japan and will be able to keep in contact.

Project news - CPDN
They were attacked and the project has been down for the last few days. No further news yet as to what happened.

Project new - Seti
They have upgraded the memory in a router which should have resolved the randon connection issues. Apparently it didn't have enough memory to cope with all the connections going at once. Hopefully it might also improve network throughput.

16th of October

2011-10-16T10:01:00.000+11:00

Milestones
None again.

BOINC testing
We got 6.12.41 during the week. It fixes a couple of memory leaks.

I suggested a change to the way file transfer back-offs are handled. Dr Anderson has amended the process stightly and added these changes to the 6.13 client (which I am staying away from). I will ask if we can get it put into the 6.12 client as well.

Farm news
Well as you can tell the farm is still going, although in a reduced capacity at the moment as its starting to warm up in Sydney. The trip to Japan has been postponed for another week.

Project news - CPDN
Work has been rather sporadic as they wait for work units to be completed before generating more. They have a bunch of hadam3p (regional) work units available to download at the moment.

They are having a problem with the permissions on some of the files so they get stuck in downloading. Until somebody from the project can fix that we can't get the last 2 files that make up a work unit.

Project news - Seti
They are having their fall funding drive. I have made a donation to help them keep running.

We have been having some discussions around how to better use the limited network bandwidth over there. Hopefully some of the suggestions can be implemented. None of them involve hardware, just changes to data formats, compression of requests, reduced information in requests, etc.

8th of October

2011-10-08T15:50:00.000+11:00

Milestones
Nothing new this week.

BOINC testing
We got 6.12.39 this week to give a run. Its pretty much the same as .34 but has a few changes around the virtual box handling and some Mac stuff.

I have made a request on the mailing list to amend the way BOINC handles back-off on file transfers. My idea is to back-off on a per URL basis rather than the whole project. This should alleviate the problem we had last week where Einstein GPU work had download issues and we couldn't get any CPU work which was available from other servers. Dr Anderson has said he'll look into changing the way it works.

Farm news
Things have been chugging away during the week. I have purchased a couple more shelving units. The file server has moved into a rack since taking last weeks photos.

The place where I am working want to send me to Japan for 4-6 weeks as early as next week. That means the farm will be off while I am away. It also means I won't be updating this blog for a while.

The 3 Climate Prediction full-res ocean work units finished yesterday and have been uploaded. Just as well seeing as they take 550 hours and farm will be off.

iPad development
The developer isn't sure how to test it, so I have repeated what I told him before, which was to install BOINC on another machine and use the iPad BOINC manager that he has managed to compile to talk to it. It gets very frustrating when you have to keep repeating instructions, all of this by email. Anyway we will see if he can get it to work.

1st of October

2011-10-02T00:12:00.003+10:00

A pinch and a punch for the first of the month.

Milestones
Nothing new yet, but will probably get to 45 million for GPUgrid tomorrow.

BOINC testing
Well I didn't do any this week. 6.13.6 came out today, but I still don't think its stable yet.

Farm news
They say a change is as good as a holiday. So I have reorganised things. Instead of having the i7's stacked on top of each other I have given them their own shelving unit. This should hopefully reduce the heat a bit. I have also raised them off the floor some more to allow for power boards, which I also replaced.

These CM Storm Sniper cases have a fan in the base blowing air up from the bottom and onto the graphics card which is another reason why I moved them up a bit (less dust/hair from the carpet getting sucked up).

As you can see there are 2 machines on the left and 3 on the right. The last one doesn't have a shelving unit at the moment and hasn't been plugged in.

The cabling isn't tied off. I need to get a couple more lan cables and then I can use cable ties to make the cabling a bit more secure and neat. While I do have enough cables I use color coded ones for some parts of the network.

You can't see it but to the right (and in the middle of the room) is the file server with its UPS and one of the quaddies. I need to sort out some shelving units for them too. The UPS was full of dust so gave it a bit of a clean. The dust filters on the file server were also clogged up so I gave them a clean as well. I was going to wash them but couldn't work out how to get them off.

You can see the graphics from a Climate Prediction work unit on the screen. Its one of those full-res ocean work units that take 550 hours. The figurine on the right is Darth Maul, so you can guess which machine he is standing on.

Project news - Einstein
This weekend they are having download problems with the GPU work. Its been fine most of the week, but this weekend downloads have been backing-off and when they do get through they are very slow. Its probably because of the number of users all wanting GPU work.

25th of September

2011-09-25T17:39:00.002+10:00

Milestones
Nothing new to report this week.

BOINC testing
We got a 6.12.37 for testing as well as the major re-write version 6.13.4. I am not currently testing the 6.13.x versions until they become a bit more stable.

I will be trialling 6.12.37 in the coming week although there is no useful functionality that I am interested in just yet. Its mostly around Mac installer fixes for OSX and some additions to the Virtual Box handling.

Farm news
Maul managed to trash all its Einstein cuda work on Saturday, complaining that one of the exe files had disappeared. When I noticed it I suspended the project and detached and then re-attached. This has the effect of deleting all the project files (when you detach) and then downloading them all again (when you re-attach). This got it going again. I have since run a disk diagnostics on it but it hasn't found any issue. The drive is one that I bought earlier in the year, so isn't too old.

The weather turned cold over the weekend so I have fired up a couple of the GTX570's for GPUgrid work. I normally don't run them during the day due to the amount of heat they produce, but being cold its not an issue.

BOINC Manager on iPad
I am paying for an iPad developer to port the BOINC manager to the iPad. Part of the problem is the supporting libaries aren't available on the iPad. While he has managed to get a working version of wxWidgets (used extensively in the manager) its more recent than the version BOINC has been using and various wx functions have changed. He is trying to work around these isses.

I am not trying to get the core client or other parts of BOINC working on the iPad at the moment, the exercise is just to get a working manager so one can access your computers via the iPad.

LucidLogix Adventure
I have sent another email to Edom in Taiwan asking for pricing on the Adventure 2800 and 2500. These are PCIe bus expansion chassis. The Adventure 2800 offers 11 PCIe connectors single spaced and the Adventure 2500 has 4 PCIe connectors double spaced. No response yet from them. I last heard from them in December 2010.

MSI N450GTS
I have been upable to find a source for these single slot cards. It seems Newegg no longer has them available. The computer shop have spoken to their local MSI representative but they don't know when they will be available either.

The idea was to replace the GT240's in Maul with these. If I ever manage to get an Adventure 2800 they could also be used in there. There is a GT545 which has 144 cuda cores and looks almost the same as as the old GT240's.

17th of September

2011-09-17T21:42:00.001+10:00

Milestones
Passed 10 million for Einstein earlier in the week.

BOINC testing
As mentioned last week 6.13.3 came out. It has been withdrawn due to not being able to upload. It also has various issues around fetching work.

Farm news
One of my old Acer Veriton v7900's has a failed motherboard, so I took the memory out of it and put it into Obi-Wan. As it had a 32 bit version of Windows XP it wasn't able to use all the memory. This weekend I installed Windows 7 x64 on it. Its off and running again.

The Drobo also got some new 3Tb drives installed. Rather than just re-copying the files across to it I let it recover the raid onto the new drives and then repeated the process a couple more times as I removed the older 2Tb drives one at a time. The 2Tb drives are now up for sale.

11th of September

2011-09-11T13:27:00.001+10:00

Milestones
Nothing new again this week, although getting close to one for Einstein

BOINC testing
6.13.3 was released this week. It is still not stable, so I don't suggest people try it. From reading the change log it looks like they have just about rewritten it from the ground up. I haven't bothered with it yet. Oh and you can upgrade from an earlier version, but you can't go back unless you have a backup of the data directory.

Farm news
As mentioned last week Obi-Wan had a clogged up heatsink. I got the shop to clean it out and reapply thermal paste. They did it on the spot for me and it is now back in action.

While I was at the shop I dropped off both of the faulty GTX460's to arrange warranty repair or replacement.

Project news - CPDN
CPDN has produced another batch of full-res ocean work units and I have picked up 3 on one machine. So I need to leave it going for about 550 hours to finish them off.

Project news - Einstein
They are now up to 10 new Pulsars found in the Parkes data. This goes to show that the southern hemisphere probably has a lot more undiscovered pulsars and other bodies.

Einstein is having problems with the number of users after cuda work. Not only have they had to setup another machine to generate work units because they couldn't keep up, but now their network connection is getting hammered (probably as a result of having more work available). They had a CPU and a GPU version of the app for the Binary Radio Pulsar Search, but are now only giving out work to GPU hosts.

Project news - Seti
They were trying to process some older data, however it has turned out to be un-usable. Various processes that split the data into work units kept crashing, so they have given up on it and are processing newer data. This meant that they didn't have any work available for a while.

There is a newer v7 app in the works for multi-beam searches. The optimised GPU version is already available but the CPU version is not.

4th of September

2011-09-04T10:59:00.003+10:00

Milestones
Nope nothing new this week

BOINC testing
6.12.34 (Windows/Linux) and 6.12.35 (Mac) were promoted to release status. No real change for me as I am already running 6.12.34 on all the boxes except one.

Farm News
Things have been fairly quiet. I finished off the two remaining CPDN full-res ocean work units and then couldn't get any other CPDN work until a couple of days ago. They are only running 2 experiments, the regional (HADAM3P-EU) and the Rapid-Rapit (HADCM3N also known as the full-res ocean), so there isn't much work getting generated and when it is they all get taken quickly.

I got fed-up with Chrome not displaying web pages when IE works fine, so I removed Chrome from most of the machines. I will remove it from the 2 remaining machines today.

I got a new router, which has improved download speeds a bit. The IP addresses on my network changed so that created a bit of work.

27th of August

2011-08-27T23:06:00.001+10:00

Milestones
Nothing new this week.

Farm News
The GTX460's have been removed from the machines. As mentioned previously they both seem to have failed memory. It turns out they have a 2 year warranty so they should be able to be repaired/replaced under the warranty.

In the mean time the GTX560Ti has been installed in Obi Wan as you can see from the pictures below. It looks almost the same as the GTX460 that it replaced but is almost 1 inch longer.

While I was poking around in there I noticed the CPU heatsink was covered in dust, so I gave it a bit of a blow-out using a can of air. It really needs to be removed and the fan taken off to be done properly. Something I will get the shop to do.

Project news - GPUgrid
They are preparing a new science app for release in Fall 2011. The main differences:
- 10% faster on Fermi.
- It should support parallel gpu runs later on
- It drops support to compute capability 1.1 and 1.2 (so it supports from 1.3 inclusive)

Project news - Seti
Their raw data storage raid got itself tangled up last week so no work was getting created while they fixed up the raid and restored the data from an off-site backup. They have now got it going so work is flowing again, although the usual network congestion issues remain.

Speaking of network congestion they have identified a problem with one of their routers. They think it needs a memory upgrade to cope with the number of connections it needs to handle.

21st of August

2011-08-21T10:39:00.003+10:00

Milestones
I passed 42 million for GPUgrid.

Farm News
The GTX460 in Obi-Wan seems to have died. It started by failing work units after 4 seconds. It then was drawing purple squares all over the screen. I ran the cuda memory tester on it and it covered the whole window with purple squares. I swapped it out with another one and it too failed the cuda memory test, so I assume both are dead.

At the moment Obi-Wan is running without a GPU (it has on board video). I have ordered a GTX560Ti as a replacement.

As the GT240's in Maul are getting a little dated I am looking for suitable replacements. They need to be single-slot cards. I came up with the GT545 which looks pretty much like the GT240. MSI also make a GTS450 available as a single-slot card, although a number of complaints about fan noise on them.

Project news - Einstein
They have discovered another 3 binary pulsars from the Parkes radio telescope data. That brings them up to 9 so far.

We need another decent size radio telescope in Australia to cover the southern hemisphere given these previously undiscovered binary pulsars. There is a proposal to build a wide-area array (similar to the Allen telescope) in Western Australia but that may not happen.

14th of August

2011-08-14T01:17:00.000+10:00

Milestones
No new milestones to report this week.

BOINC testing
Updated Chekov to 6.12.34. There is a 6.12.35 out, but its for the Mac only.

I have put a request out on Freelancer to get the BOINC manager ported to the iPad. This (if it happens) will allow me to control the machines remotely. I can do this from my laptop but I prefer to use the iPad as its ligher, more portable and the battery lasts longer.

Farm news
Things have been running smoothly for most of the week. In fact I haven't even looked at the machines for most of the week.

Two of the four CPDN full-res ocean work units finished and the other two are running with 200+ hours left to go.

I updated the nVidia drivers to 280.26 on all the running machines. This supports CUDA 4.0 and is slightly faster than previous versions.

New project: Radioactive@home
This is a new project being run out of a university in Poland. They are mapping radiation. To use it you'll need an external sensor that plugs into a USB port, pretty much like EQN does. It runs as a non-CPU intensive task in BOINC the same as EQN does.

The project is in start-up mode at the moment and doesn't have sufficent sensors. After prototyping a sensor, they are now getting some manufactured, however their initial oder was only for 50 and they have all be taken. Their URL is: http://radioactiveathome.org/boinc/

6th of August

2011-08-06T11:46:00.000+10:00

Milestones
Passed 41 million for GPUgrid.

BOINC tasks
This is a monitoring program that is great for keeping an eye on all the machines from a single computer. Its similar to BOINCview. Its been updated to version 1.09. It can be found at http://www.efmer.eu/boinc/boinc_tasks/

BOINC testing
There is a 6.13.1 being tested. It has some fairly major changes from 6.12.x around the work fetch algorithm and its early days. That is its too risky to try it out just yet.

There is also a 6.12.34 being tested. This has some minor fixes as well as a couple of installer fixes. The windows installer had an incorrect DLL file in the package. The Mac installer has been updated to work with OSX 10.7 (Lion). Maul is running 6.12.34 and I will update the others later as it seems pretty stable.

Farm news
Weather has been warm despite being winter here in Sydney. As a result I've suspended GPUgrid for a few days as the GTX570's generate a fair bit of heat. Instead I have left a few machines (Maul, Chekov with Obi-Wan intermittently) running CPU only work.

Seti is still plagued with download issues (not enough bandwidth and too many users). I can't see any easy fix for this and its likely to take some time before anything can be done.

Chekov has 4 of the Climate Prediction full-res ocean work units running. These take 550 hours or so. Two of them are around 80% done and the other two are a long way off completing.

Project news - Einstein
They have a new gamma ray search running, so work for that has now started flowing. Its a CPU only task at the moment although they have said they are looking at a GPU version.

We're also crunching the gravity wave data as well as the binary pulsar search using Arecibo data. We've pretty much finished off the binary pulsar search using the Parkes data (which has so far found 6 new pulsars).

2011-07-24T21:44:00.000+10:00

Milestones

Well this week I managed to knock over another million for GPUgrid. Below is my 40M certificate.

BOINC testing
While I was away 6.12.33 became the recommended version (I was already running it).

We're on another round of testing now for the 6.13.x version. I have yet to download and install it as there are quite a few changes that need to become a bit more stable. The main change in this one is to make the skins, used in simple view, more translatable for languages other than English. There are also some scheduler changes in this.

Farm News
This week was a short week for the farm as I only got back on Tuesday. Nothing much to report other than the weather is better in Vancouver than here in Sydney, where its been raining all week. Now we're into the weekend its finally stopped raining.

The farm powered up first go, except for when I plugged Maul back in and the earth leakage circuit breaker (safety switch) tripped and that was before I had even turned it on! After resetting the breaker and retracing things step by step it worked fine.

Project news - Einstein
We have been processing data from the Parkes radio telescope. They have discovered 5 new pulsars in the data so far. Here is a link to message thread on the Einstein@home web site regarding this: http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/forum_thread.php?id=8979

As we have now processed all the Parkes data we are transitioning to a new run of BRP (Binary Radio Pulsar) search using new data from Arecibo. There is little or no GPU work available at the moment, but CPU work units are available.

Run down

2011-06-24T21:39:00.001+10:00

The farm finished off all its work now. All the machines have been powered down. I am off on a vacation soon. I will be away for a few weeks.

This week GPUgrid hit the 39 million mark. The GTX570's can really chew through their work units.

Seti has still been plagued by network issues, so the farm has been concentrating on Einstein and GPUgrid work. Unfortunately they are so popular and can't handle the number of users they have via a 100Mbit network connection. They really need a faster connection to the outside world, but unless somebody with deep pockets is willing to come up with the cash it isn't likely to happen.

19th of June

2011-06-19T22:57:00.002+10:00

Milestones
Well its been a fortnight since the last post. I managed to pass 38 million for GPUgrid and 8 million for Einstein.

BOINC testing
We have 6.12.33 to test at the moment. Not much different to the previous couple of versions other than bug fixes. I have put it on 3 machines at the moment, the others haven't been updated from the release version (6.12.26) yet.

Farm news
There is a new optimized GPU app available for Seti (known as x38g), which is somewhat faster than the previous optimized GPU app (x32f). It caters for the newer V7 format work units which will be introduced later this year, as well as handling the current V6 format. It requires cuda 3.2 capable drivers to be installed, which I already had. I have it running on the 2 machines that do Seti work.

I am running the cache down on all of the machines as I will be taking a trip soon. The farm will be off while I am away.

Project news - GPUgrid
They brought out a revised app known as 6.14 for cuda 3.1 capable machines. Unfortunately they set the task priority to Above Normal so the whole machine is sluggish. Their main developer has gone off on a 10 day (work) trip to the US, so we have to put up with it for the next week or two.

Project news - Seti
They have been having network congestion issues for the last week or so. Now they are starting to run low on the data to send out due to having a whole bunch of short work units. They can't get their raw data off their backup and split it into work units fast enough.

Last week they did their Green Bank observing and have lots of data to process. It will probably require a new application as their data format is slightly different to what they get from Arecibo. We might get to process this data towards the end of this year depending on how fast they can come up with a new science application.

5th of June

2011-06-05T14:27:00.000+10:00

Milestones
As you can see from the certificate below I managed to pass 35 million for GPUgrid.

BOINC testing
We got 6.12.28 during the week. There us a bug fix where 6.12.27 was corrupting the output files for all work units.

There is also a feature when setting a project to No New Tasks it will report on every upload (rather than last upload). I queried this as it will add overhead to the scheduling servers, but Dr Anderson thinks its minimal impact.

Farm news
Nothing much to report for the farm this week. I have been keeping a couple of the GTX570 machines busy all week, hence the GPUgrid milestone.

Still no work from CPDN at the moment.

Project news - Seti
Their network connection has been maxxed out for the whole week. Downloads keep going into back-off mode and uploads too. They have a 100Mbit link but with 100,000+ computers all trying to connect at the same time. Their problem is being compounded by the fact they are giving out short work units that get processed quickly, which means they are being returned faster and then more work is requested.

For the time being I have set my couple of machines that do Seti work to concentrate on other projects.

29th of May

2011-05-29T17:34:00.000+10:00

Milestones
I passed 34 million for GPUgrid. See I am making those GTX570's do some work.

Farm news
I went away last weekend and as the tradies were doing the bathroom again on Monday I left everything off for 3 days.

I finished off my other Full Resolution Ocean work unit for Climate Prediction. It took 528 hours to complete.

I am now getting the S6Bucket work units from Einstein. They are the S6 run of the gravity wave data.

Project news - Climate Prediction
They still don't have any work available. They are reconfiguring servers and moving files around. This is taking longer than they expected. Until the reconfigure has finished no new work will be generated.

Project news - Seti
Their storage server died and so they stopped work unit creation as well as uploads and downloads being effected. Apparently its now fixed but due to the number of people trying to upload and download the network is maxed out and nothing is moving.

Power nap

2011-05-16T22:46:00.000+10:00

This week wasn't that productive. I've had various builders running around demolishing a leaking shower and the rotten floor under it. The machines were all off and unplugged at the beginning of the week. Its the same again this week as they have decided the whole of the bathroom floor needs to be replaced.

Milestones
Despite the destruction of the bathroom I managed to pass 33 million for GPUgrid.

CPDN full ocean work units
I managed to finish off my first one. It took 511 hours to complete. Its been uploaded and reported. I still have another one running on a different machine and its 65% through at the moment, so another 9 days of crunching before its done.

Project news - CPDN
They are out of work. They have some projects in the works but due to storage issues (the work units product some huge files) they might be holding off creating more work units until they can get some of the ones being crunched back.

Project news - Einstein
They are having an open day on Saturday the 2nd of June at AEI Hannover.

Apart from that they also have a new type of work unit designated the S6Bucket. I haven't managed to pick any of these up yet so can't provide any details about them.

8th of May

2011-05-08T23:33:00.000+10:00

Milestones
Passed 32 million for GPUgrid during the week.

GTX570 installed
I put the other Palit GTX570 Sonic Platinum card into Sulu during the weekend. I hit a minor snag as the power connector had an 8 pin-only PCIe plug, but it turned out to be a 6 to 8 pin adaptor. The GTX50 needs two 6 pin PCIe power cables plugged in, whereas the old GTX295 needed 6 and an 8 pin power cable.

QCN sensors
The company I bought these through shipped me another pair of them. I only placed one order in March. They seem to have processed the order twice. Rather than send them back I will keep them. I have let them know and they'll give them to me at a discount seeing as I didn't make two orders.

Project update - Seti@home
They have started recording data from the Green bank radio telescope this weekend. While we don't expect to be able to process it immediately, as there is some mapping of the data to a common format and some other software development required, there is some hope it will happen soon.

We've also been prompting them to see if they can use the data from the Parkes radio telescope. At the moment they don't have any agreement for data sharing or a data recorder in place.

BOINC tasks
This is an add-on program that was written by a fellow cruncher for monitoring a group of machines (up to 60). Its quite similar to the old favorite BOINCview, which is getting rather out of date. I have installed it on my old laptop to see how it goes, and its quite good now, supporting some of the new functions such as Notices which are only in the development versions of BOINC.

You can grab a copy from http://www.efmer.eu/

1st of May

2011-05-01T11:10:00.001+10:00

Milestones
Passed 32 million for GPUgrid. Einstein is also coming up on one.

Allen Telescope Array hibernation
This was initially funded by Microsoft founder Paul Allen, however the SETI institute has run out of money to keep it running. This has no impact on Seti@home. Despite press reports saying S@H is effected, its not. The SETI institute and Seti@home are two separate organisations. S@H doesn't even get data from the ATA. For more details see the Q&A link below from Dr Eric Korpela of the Seti@home project:

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=63888

BOINC testing
After last weeks issues caused by the Microsoft security patch we now have 6.12.26. So far its got a few minor things that I have picked up, but nothing that would prevent it being released to the public.

CPDN full resolution ocean wu
As I mentioned last week I have picked up one last week. It has been crunching away for the last 138 hours and is about one third complete. So another couple of weeks at least before its done. I have also managed to get another one on a 2nd machine, so it will be running for the next 21 days as well. The current estimate is 509 hours to complete them on a standard i7-920.

GTX570
I still haven't put the 2nd Palit GTX570 into a machine yet. I am planning on swapping out the GTX295 that is in Sulu. I will be selling off the older card.

Processing 24/7
Now the cooler weather is with us in the southern hemisphere, I have been running more of the computers. In additional the CPDN work units need so long to crunch that I have left those (now 2) machines running 24/7 so they can meet the project deadlines.

25th of April

2011-04-25T21:10:00.004+10:00

Milestones
Passed 11 million for Seti. GPUgrid is closing in on one too.

BOINC 6.12.25 released
6.12.23 came out on Thursday and failed to run. Its seems Microsoft's recent C run-time security fix earlier in the week has broken a number of programs, BOINC included. On Saturday we had 6.12.24 for Windows but it too failed and today we got 6.12.25 which resolves the issues.

EVGA precision is also getting errors since the Microsoft security patch.

CPDN full resolution ocean wu
They have these new work units with a full resolution ocean. I managed to pick one up which is currently estimating 490 hours to completion. Its been running for over 2 days already. That means the machine will need to be on 24/7 for at least 20 days to finish it. They have a 3 month deadline, so that doesn't leave much leeway.

GTX570 Sonic
Well its off and running. As expected its faster than the reference design. It also runs cooler than the reference design. Without having to resort to manually controlling the fan speed it seems happy to sit on 66 or 67 degrees C while crunching. Some of the "long" GPUgrid work units take around 11.15 hours on the Palit and 12.75 hours on the EVGA, so a bit of an improvement.

Kirk and the disappearing video card
As mentioned before I was going to remove the SSD from Kirk. I have now removed it. I had a few issues with software referencing the D: drive (which is now the C: drive) and had to reinstall the video drivers and BOINC. I still need to run it for a while before I can say its behaving but it would appear to be fixed.

Nvidia 270.61 driver
These were released during the week. There have been some reports of them down-clocking. The main advantage of these is they support Cuda 4.0. The Cuda 4.0 toolkit is at release candidate 2 status at the moment (ie hasn't been publicly released).

Palit GTX570 Sonic

2011-04-21T00:02:00.000+10:00

Here are some pictures of the Palit GTX570 Sonic card. The Sonic range from Palit are factory over-clocked graphics cards.

And here are some screen shots from GPU-Z with it running a GPUgrid task

And lastly a screen shot from Vtune (available from the Palit website). As you can see despite the dual fans it still runs hot.

18th of April

2011-04-19T23:25:00.000+10:00

Milestones
Nothing new this week, but closing in on one for Seti.

Chrome
Seeing as Microsoft is pushing IE9 down the Windows Update pipe I have removed IE from all the machines. As mentioned in my previous post there are a few reasons not to use it. I have now installed Chrome on all machines instead.

File Server
After being back for a couple of weeks its now been fully commissioned and the old one is tucked in a corner of the loft. Backups and things are somewhat quicker than the old machine.

I still need to get WSUS installed on it to save on Windows updates. The virus scanner also has an update server module that can be installed to save on updates.

GPUgrid long work units
As if they weren't long enough they have a new batch of the long work units. The short ones take about 6 hours on my reference GTX570 and 10 hours on the GTX295 and GTX275. The long ones seem to be about 8.5 hours. I haven't tried running them on the old graphics cards.

GTX570 installed
I got a pair of Palit GTX570 Platinum Sonic cards. These are factory over-clocked versions of the GTX570. I have installed one in Chekov and got it going. It completed its 1st GPUgrid work unit yesterday. As expected it finished it off somewhat quicker than the reference GTX570. I will post more information about the new card later.

Kirk woes
I got the kingston memory late last week and installed it in Kirk. Its staying its having trouble with the graphics card now. Maybe the PCIe slot has gone faulty or maybe something else is causing the issue. I have swapped the graphics card with another one, but that didn't solve the problem. I'll look at removing the SSD next, once I have copied the data off it.

9th of April

2011-04-09T14:30:00.002+10:00

Milestones
Nothing this week.

Slow internet
I tracked this down to IPv6. Seeing as the old file server was Windows XP based it knew nothing about IPv6, however Windows Server 2008 R2 does. My network hardware and ISP don't support IPv6.

There is a registry change one can make to disable it, or you can right-click on your network adapter and choose properties -> IPv6 and untick it. This works fine until you reboot and then its back again.

Microsoft also have a "Fix it" that applies the registry fix, called MicrosoftFixit50444. The registry fix doesn't appear to work whatever way you apply it. Its probably been broken since Service Pack 1 as the fix pre-dates SP1. Despite that i've run it on all the Windows 7 machines and the file server.

[update]
It seems you need to power-off the machine for the fix to work. A reboot isn't sufficent. Having powered them all off and restarted them seems to have resolved the issue.

BOINC testing
We got 6.12.22 this week. Mostly screen saver fixes, but looks like they might get this one released soon. I've upgraded all the machines with it this weekend.

Memories
The memory for the i7-970 machine is on back order with Kingston. They think it will ship next week. Until it arrives i've been leaving it switched off.

Project news - Einstein
They are transitioning to a new run of the gravity wave search, which will no doubt add pressure to their servers as we need to download new data packs. They are currently looking at their scheduler with a view to not removing old data packs from client machines until all old work units have been completed.

Project news - Climate Prediction
They have a new type of work unit modelling the role of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC). They use more detailed ocean rules, as such they take more time to complete. Previously they would only run these on a super computer, however they are now doing this via distributed computing.

6th of April

2011-04-07T00:23:00.000+10:00

File Server
This weekend was spent setting up the file server. Everything has been copied over and its running quite happily at the moment.

I do however have a problem with the proxy server, Squid, taking a while for DNS lookups. It seems to take about 10 seconds or so before it finds a web site. After that the pages load nice and fast. The only thing thats changed is its gone from a Windows XP box to a Windows Server 2008 box. The rest of the network is unchanged and the configuration was unchanged.

From searching on the internet most people say its an issue with the DNS addresses not being defined, but its being picked up from the registry and pointing to the router's DNS address. I tried using the ISP's DNS server address but it doesn't make any difference. I'm now thinking its probably got more to do with the firewall on the server, so will do some experimenting with it.

Kirk issues
Kirk crashed last week and now seems to get errors on every Einstein CPU work unit, so i've stopped it running Einstein for the time being. I expect its the memory again. I've ordered some Kingston memory modules for it and they should arrive next week (currently they are out of stock).

Project news - Einstein
They are transitioning to a new search run with different work units, so its likely there will be lots of downloads of new data packs.

IE9 issues
It seems that it's not ready for prime time, even through its now being offered via Windows Update. A few problems I have had with it so far:

It clobbers the existing Java, so you need to reinstall java after installing IE9
There is no flash player for the 64 bit IE9. The adobe web site suggest using a beta version, which no longer exists.
Its not available for Windows XP, so you lose compatibility with XP machines

Chrome doesn't have these issues, and its still faster than IE9.

All home

2011-03-27T17:50:00.000+11:00

Milestones
Nothing new this week, creeping up on something for GPUgrid.

BOINC testing
6.12.19 came out at the end of the week, so I haven't had a chance to put in on anything yet. Mostly minor fixes. There is a fix for the screen-saver crashing, but I don't use the BOINC screen saver anyway.

Kirk graphics card
I had this machine off during the week. When the weather cooled down on Friday I went to start it up and it refused to boot and just gave error beeps. After digging out a manual to find out what the beep codes were it was complaining about the graphics card. I removed the GTX295 from it and put a GTX460 in there to get it going.

It seems I might need to look at getting the Palit GTX570 Sonic Platinum cards. I am hoping the release on Thursday of the new GTX590 will force the price of the GTX570 to drop, so I can get them a bit cheaper.

New server back
Its finally been sorted out by the shop. The faulty hard drive got replaced a couple of weeks ago and now the memory has been replaced as well. I picked it up on Saturday, but have yet to get him out of the box and swap the functions over from the old P4.

Windows 7 SP1
The DVD arrived just before the weekend, so I ran around updating the machines on Friday and Saturday. They take around an hour to do each machine, except Kirk which has an SSD. It only took about 15 minutes to complete.

20th of March

2011-03-20T14:17:00.005+11:00

Milestones
I passed 50 million for all projects this weekend. Below is my BOINCstats image.

BOINC testing
We are still on 6.12.18 this week. No major issues. There is some discussion going on about the notices and what people would like to see.

Project news - ClimatePrediction
They finally sorted out their space issues and I have managed (after 2 weeks) to upload the last results for the EU work units that I was running. I have since downloaded another 8 to crunch. I run them 2 at a time and suspend the others.

The Famous experiment they were running has almost finished. They have processed 200,000 work units and will generate a some more to finalise the experiment.

Project news - Seti
They seem to have run out of work this weekend. No major issue if you have a couple of projects running like me.

IE9 is out
I'm running it on one machine. Unfortunately its not available for Windows XP so I probably won't be updating the other machines. Its definately faster than IE8 and probably a bit more secure too.

I was going to try Google Chrome as well and see how it works out. At least it should work under Windows XP.

13th of March

2011-03-13T21:27:00.002+11:00

Milestones
Nothing this week, although I am close to 50 million credits for all projects.

QCN
It stands for Quake Catcher Network. Its a BOINC project that use a motion sensor (either in a laptop or attached via USB). Last week I ordered a couple of USB sensors. They come in kit form as you can see below. Some assembly required. Actually you need to solder the 4 wires onto the circuit board and then put it into the plastic box. The circuit board is approx 1 inch square.

So mine is now setup, although not in a very good location at the moment. The software runs within BOINC as a non-CPU intensive app (doesn't seem to use any CPU according to task manager) just monitoring the sensor.

BOINC testing
We got up to 6.12.18 this week. Its mainly fine tuning the notices and work-fetch at the moment. I've put it on a couple of machines and its working okay for me.

There was one user who has a 160 CPU machine that doesn't seem to be able to get more than 60 CPUs recognised. If only the rest of us had this problem :) It seems Windows groups the CPU's into processor groups of not more than 64, so scheduling tasks across all of them is somewhat different than a smaller system.. They have made some coding changes to allow for this, but we will have to wait for another build.

7th of March

2011-03-07T21:49:00.002+11:00

Kirk back home
It seems they might have actually fixed him up. It has spent the entire weekend doing work, mainly Einstein which is particularly memory intensive.

I had a couple of BSOD's but they were caused by GPUgrid and the nvidia driver commiting suicide. I deleted a file out of the GPUgrid slot directory to stop it crashing everytime I started BOINC. When I next started BOINC up it deleted everything to do with GPUgrid. I then had to reattach to the project.

I had this problem with the other machine that has a GTX295. I believe its an issue with cuda 3.1 not knowing which GPU is doing what, as it doesn't happen on my single-gpu machines.

5th of March

2011-03-05T20:47:00.005+11:00

Milestones
None this week.

BOINC testing
We got 6.12.16 today. It has a number of changes around the notices area. I will be putting it on a machine later tonight.

Kirk home
Yes he finally came home. It also has a SSD in it. It doesn't really need one. I'm not too sure why I got it, but anyway it there now. So far its managed to finish off its work successfully, so i've given it a full load along with a couple of GPUgrid tasks. We'll see how it handles them.

The 120mm fan on the back of the case was rattling, so I got them to replace it with a Noctua while I was there. It would seem the CoolerMaster fans aren't too reliable as its the 2nd one I have had to replace so far.

Project news - Climate Prediction
Its seems we can't upload or get any work from them at the moment. I have a couple of completed EU tasks on one machine that have been trying to upload for a couple of days and the trickles can't get through either.

From checking on their web site it appears they are doing some database maintenance that is running longer than expected.

Project news - GPUgrid
It seems nvidia have jumped to Cuda 4.0 (well its in release candidate mode for a March release). The GPUgrid guys are just going to skip 3.2 and go to 4.0 for the next app. They will still support Cuda 3.1 for those people running older drivers.

Project selection
Given Orbit has gone into hibernation I have detached all the machines from it except Maul. I left him on it even though its not likely to get any work, so that way I will know if they come back online.

At the moment Maul and Obi-Wan are doing Seti work almost exclusively, the others are running a mixture of Climate Prediction, Einstein and GPUgrid.

Weather
It turned cooler today, so I have 4 machines running flat-out at the moment, including Kirk. They have managed to get through a fair bit of work so we might get near a milestone or two in about a week.

27th of February

2011-02-27T20:53:00.003+11:00

Congratulations
Fellow cruncher msattler passed 100,000,000 credits for Seti@home this weekend. My congratualtions to him on such a remarkable achievement.

Windows 7 SP1 out
Microsoft released it officially on the 22nd of Feb. I don't want to download it multiple times (ie for each machine). About a month ago I ran the service pack blocker, which stops it automatically downloading via windows update. Yesterday I ordered the service pack on DVD. The DVD is free, but I have to pay for postage.

26th of February

2011-02-26T15:48:00.007+11:00

Milestones
I passed 6 million for Einstein during the week. Below is my certificate.

Machines in the shop
The new file server had one of its brand-new hard drives diagnosed as faulty. I will be dropping it back to where it came from for a replacement during the week. Unfortunately I got it online so I have to organise the swap over.

The 1Gb memory in the file server is getting replaced under warranty, hopefully with Kingston this time. Apparently Corsair don't make 1Gb sticks any more.

The 2Gb memory in Maul is getting replaced with more of the same. The distributor the shop purchased from doesn't want to replace it with Kingston.

BOINC testing
They have tweaked the testing criteria. Over all 6.12.15 seems fairly okay but there have been a few fixes applied that we are waiting for a new build. The next major version will address installer issues.

Project news - Einstein
We are currently analysing the S5 gravity wave run at the top end of their spectrum. They have decided they are going to use some of the data from S6 gravity wave run. Apparently its rather "noisy" but they believe they can use some of it but there will be varying run time due to tests they will use on it.

Project news - Orbit
Their initial grant has been used up. They applied for another one from NASA but it has been knocked back due to funding cuts to the NASA budget. That leaves the project without funding to continue.

It is probably one of the more useful projects to improve search strategies for near-earth objects that potentially will impact with the earth. Even political leaders might want to know they are going to be flattened by a rock before its too late to do anything about it.

Project news - Seti beta
They are looking at adding an extra search algorithm to their existing multi-beam work units. This will be tested on Seti beta before getting deployed to the main site.

19th of February

2011-02-19T18:32:00.005+11:00

Milestones
Coming up on one for Einstein, but just a bit shy of 6 million at the moment.

BOINC testing
We got 6.12.15 this week. It addresses some installer issues for the Mac. It has a couple of tweaks around work fetch that apply to all versions. It won't ask for work if it uploaded in the last 5 minutes. I suspect this will lead to issues where people won't be able to build up a decent cache of work, but time will tell. Its meant to reduce the load on project servers that are overloaded.

Robocopy
Its a copy utility that comes with Windows 7 and Server 2008. There is also a version for Windows XP and Server 2003. It was designed as a reliable copy utility, however its much quicker than Xcopy or Windows Explorer.

I setup batch jobs (it runs from a command prompt) to backup the BOINC data directory to the file server. Depending on the amount of data this was taking up to 20 minutes to copy a couple of Gb. When using Robocopy it can do the same job up to 20 times faster. It can compare file timestamps and only copy newer or changed files a whole lot faster and skip the ones that haven't changed.

Machines in the shop
The technician who was working on both of them has been off sick for a lot of last week so they haven't done anything with the 2 machines. I'm expecting to bring them home next week.

Project news - Einstein
They have released a newer cuda cuda app that addresses all known issues with being able to cross-validate work done on a different platform. That is a Binary Pulsar work unit would fail the comparison if the version were run on a different operating system. For example the result files for a Windows work unit wouldn't match a Linux work unit.

Project news - Seti
Its up, but the network bandwidth has been totally used up since the middle of the week. Looking at the cricket graph its been pegged at 95Mbit for downloads and a smaller amount getting through for uploads. Oh to be a popular project :-)

Weather
Well the week started off cooler so I had a few machines running at the beginning and by today we're back to Maul only and running overnight. The forecast for next week is looking similar. As we head into autumn things should start to cool off and we can get more machines up and running.

12th of February

2011-02-12T22:10:00.004+11:00

Milestones
Nothing new again this week.

BOINC testing
6.12.14 came out yesterday. I've upgraded a few machines with it. Nothing new really for windows users in this one.

File server
It went back to the shop this morning. They worked on it for a few hours, with me looking on. They flashed the BIOS (that took a couple of hours as it has to be done from a floppy and the machine doesn't have a floppy drive). That didn't make any difference and it still insisted one drive was degraded. We used the Adaptec controller and it doesn't do raid 5, so back to the Intel one. It still thinks one drive is degraded, after doing a high-level format as a non-raid drive. At that point I left them to it. They we going to low-level format the offending drive when I left.

The memory is still an issue, and they will address that later. I provided invoice numbers and dates so they can return them to their supplier for a credit and give me memory that works.

Kirk
It was sitting on the same bench at the shop as the file server when I went in this morning. The shop has yet to replace the memory in it.

Project news - Seti
They are having trouble with one of their storage servers with it refusing to resync raid drives. Sound a bit like my problems. There is no new work being distributed and those that have completed work can't report it at the moment.

We have asked what additional hardware they need as it seems hard drives are failing quite regularly on the older machines, but they haven't been able to give a definitive list.

Software updates
Windows update has been giving out a fair few fixes in the last couple of weeks, so i'll run around and update each machine. Maul is fairly up to date as its running most days. There is also the nvidia driver and BOINC to bring up to the latest version on each one. Not a big deal but it all takes time and usually a reboot or two.

Update 13 Feb: It seems the nvidia control panel won't work on Win 7 x64 with a GTX295 when using 266.58 drivers. So i've had to go back to the 260.99 drivers on this machine.

8th of February

2011-02-08T22:33:00.003+11:00

Milestones
Nope, nothing new this week. Actually I haven't looked at my stats for a week or so.

Once again it was hot. Saturday got up to 40 degrees, so of course everything was off. Sunday fortunately cooled off, so I managed to get a couple of machines going.

BOINC testing
We got 6.12.13 during the week. The main difference is a change to the user accounts that it creates for the sandbox installation (ie running as a service). I don't run it that way as it doesn't allow cuda apps to run under Vista or Windows 7 due to Microsoft's security features.

Kirk
Well it went back last weekend as it kept locking up. It seems the Corsair memory is not what it claims to be. Allegedly they are rated for 1600Mhz (its printed on each stick), but running a memory test on them at that speed gets errors. The memory tester identifies them as PC10600, which should mean they are rated for 1325Mhz. Somewhat shy of 1600Mhz as printed on them.

The i7-920 never had a problem with them, but the i7-970 can presumably push them to their limit and beyond. The good thing is they have a limited lifetime warranty, so the shop will be replacing them with Kingstone Memory - when they get stock.

File server
My what a pretty case it has. The case is a Fractal Designs R3 in white. Its beautiffuly painted in white enamel inside and out.

Pity it too had problems. Apart from only thinking it has 2Gb of RAM when it actually had 3Gb it also decided the raid drives were degraded. Only problem is it wouldn't repair them which is the whole idea of having a raid 5 array.

It was painfully slow copying files across the network to it. On top of that the proxy server seems to take forever to do its job. Does anyone else run Squid 2.7 on Windows Server 2008?

All in all rather a let down. It will be off to the shop this weekend. It might be time to find another computer shop given all the recent problems with upgrades.

29th of January

2011-01-29T12:52:00.003+11:00

Milestones
Nothing again. Its been pretty warm all week, so they have been off.

BOINC versions
We had 6.12.12 this week. This one is a release candidate. So far only a few minor problems reported to do with translations into German and French. I have it on 3 machines and have yet to experience any issues with it, but I need to give it some more testing around the work-fetch area.

GTX560 released
Nvidia released the GTX560 during the week. This uses a new gpu designated GF114. It has 384 cuda cores (aka shaders). Palit have a nice looking dual-fan overclocked model called the GTX560 Ti Sonic. Its specs looks quite impressive for the $210 (AUD) price tag, so it may become the "standard" card in most of my number crunchers.

At the moment its a toss-up between an overclocked GTX560 or an overclocked GTX570, both from Palit. I'll wait and see if we can get some real-life run times from fellow crunchers before buying anything. Besides nobody has any stock.

Kirk in the shop
Well it worked last week when it came home after its upgrade. Last night when I fired it up, after having a week off, it had problems. It started off alright and when I downloaded some new work errored out the whole lot. It also locked up a couple of times and I had to use the reset switch.

This morning its back to the shop for them to look at. Of course it decided to work straight out of the box. Anyway I left it with them doing a memory test and will pick it up next week.

Server bits
The shop are supplying a case, power supply, motherboard and I am supplying the other bits. This morning I dropped off the memory kit and Windows Server 2008 to put in it. I managed to find a shop selling Windows Server 2008 fairly cheap while I was in Melbourne during the week.

I ordered some hard disks for the new server on Friday and they should arrive next week. Its getting 3 x 1Tb WD caviar black drives which will be configured as a raid 5 array.

22nd of January

2011-01-22T13:49:00.004+11:00

Milestones
None this week. Its been too hot.

BOINC testing
We got 6.12.11 during the week which is meant to address work fetch issues.

Unfortunately I left Maul fetching work for a couple of hours during the week. It went beserk and downloaded too much work. As soon as I noticed I disabled work fetch and promptly put 6.12.11 on it, but now it has to try and finish off the work its been allocated. This has been compounded by the fact its usually off during the day due to the hot weather.

Kirk upgraded
I got an i7-970 cpu during the week. This morning it was off to the computer shop for a quick upgrade. This coupled with a memory upgrade as I had a couple of memory kits lying around from 9 months ago. So now he has 12 cores and 12Gb of memory. This is what it looks like with task manager.

File Server
The old one is starting to have some issues, which isn't suprising considering its 8 years old. Its a hand me down that I was given because the power supply had failed. So i'm getting the shop to build a new box for me using some spare parts that I have and the i7-920 that came out of Kirk this morning.

Project news - Seti
Their upload server died during the week. No, its not one of the 3 new ones. They had to reconfigure the latest new server as the upload server temporarily. To quote one of the Seti staff "its much too good a machine to use as an upload server". Once they get the old server sorted out (appraently the 3ware raid controller seems to have stopped working) they will swap them back.

16th of January

2011-01-16T16:11:00.003+11:00

Milestones
None this last fortnight. Not much work done at all. The computers have mainly been off due to summer. Maul sometimes gets to run overnight but thats about it.

Project news - Einstein
They have sorted out performance issues with their cuda app (which turned out to be the worker thread wasn't raised in priority). Maul which is equipped with 3 x GT240 cards can process a cuda work unit around 2 hours 10 minutes.

Project news - Seti
The seti guys got another server, which was built and paid for by the GPU users group. This arrived at UC Berkeley last week and is now in operation.

Graphics cards
I have been looking at getting a Palit GTX570 Sonic. Unlike the EVGA GTX570 that I have its a factory overclocked model. More importantly it doesn't have the reference design cooler, but rather a dual fan one. Currently nobody seems to have stock of these in Australia. As usual i'd get one, see how it goes and if fine replace the GTX295's with one of these in each i7 except Maul. That is it would become the standard card for the i7's.

Speaking of graphics cards i'll be selling off a bunch of the old ones on eBay. I have a number of GTS250's, an old GTX295 (1st generation) and an ATI HD4850.

Intel core i7's
It seems Sandy Bridge has arrived, so the older generation i7's are now slowly running out. I'll be looking at updating the 920's with 950's and selling off the old cpus. As mentioned before i'd love to get an i7-970 but they are still around $950 each.

I might even update the old file server (it is an old P4 @ 1.8Ghz given to me for free as the power supply had blown) to something more modern and use one of the old cpus in it.

End of 2010

2011-01-01T11:27:00.004+11:00

Well this is the position at the end of 2010. Unfortunately didn't get over 50 million, but will work on that for 2011. Let see if I can get to 75 million!

There has been no crunching on the farm for the last couple of days as it been so hot. Even 30+ degrees overnight, too hot to consider starting up one or two machines even. Monday is expected to have a temperature drop so maybe then I can get a few going to make up for lost time.

All the best wishes for the new year.

Boxing day 2010

2010-12-26T22:48:00.003+11:00

Milestones
With Seti now handing out work I managed to pass 10 million. Below is my Setificate :)

Weather
Well its been hot and humid. Until tonight it was dry, but then a thunderstorm came through.

That all adds up to not much running due to the heat. Maul has been going most of the week and today I also fired up Obi-Wan who is concentrating on Seti work.

19th of December

2010-12-19T13:15:00.004+11:00

Milestones
I hit 30 million for GPUgrid this week. My certificate is below.

Adventure 2800
I finally managed to get an answer out of LucidLogix. The price is very expensive for an expansion board with 11 PCIe slots single-spaced. All the decent graphics cards are double width so that would leave 6 slots usable. I still haven't got a price for the Adventure 2500, which has 4 PCIe slots double-spaced.

It would be more cost-effective to use a 7 slot PCIe motherboard. There are a few different brands of these available for around $400 to $500. I was thinking I might be able to stuff one of these with GT240's and it would make a great Seti cuda cruncher, however I think Nvidia has hobbled the GeForce drivers so you can only have up to 4 cards per machine, to make people buy the Tesla's

Climate Prediction
Well I finally finished off the last 3 work units. One errored out with 8 hours to go (after running for 200+ hours) and the other two managed to complete successfully.

I have downloaded a couple more Famous wu. I also got allocated 6 of the newer eu work units but they all failed to download. It was complaining about being unable to find a file.

Project news - Einstein
They are still only handing out gravity wave data. They ran out of binary pulsar data from Arecibo a couple of weeks ago.

They have managed to secure data from the Parkes observatory which is requiring a bit of development to format so they can use the same binary pulsar programs we currently use.

Project news - Seti
Maul currently has a few hundred multi-beam tasks to get through. Apparently they can't split the data from the "tapes" fast enough to keep up with demand.

They are also doing a general funding drive. They are getting additional data from the Green Bank observatory that will require some development work. There was some mention they might be able to get data from Parkes a while ago.

GTX570 update

2010-12-15T22:55:00.005+11:00

After yesterdays run showing that you can fry eggs on these things I decided to try Evga Precision. This is the default settings, with the fan speed on Auto. As you can see the GTX570 could double as a cooking appliance.

After taking this screen shot I decided to ramp the fan speed up to 75%, which brought the temperature down. I cut the fan speed to 70% and it seems to be holding the GPU temp at 77 degrees C. The room temp is 28 degrees next to the computer

This is the factory standard model. I didn't get an overclocked GTX570 because of the heat, so I hate to think how they perform.

GTX570

2010-12-13T21:51:00.005+11:00

The GTX570 arrived and has been installed in Spock.

It has run a GPUgrid work unit so far. The GTX570 completed a HIVPR_unbound work unit in 14,019 seconds compared to a GTX295 that did it in 27,728 seconds. The GTX295 can run two work units at a time. They used a different GPUgrid app (6.13/cuda 3.1 on the GTX570, 6.12/cuda 3.0 on the GTX295), so it may be more like comparing apples with oranges.

GPU temps got up to 85 degrees which was rather warm.

The GTX295 is still the best value for number crunching at this point, although that may change when a cuda 3.2 GPUgrid app becomes available.

GPU-Z details

GPU-Z Sensors tab with it under load

Installed in Spock

Another shot looking up

11th of December

2010-12-11T17:21:00.002+11:00

Milestones
None this week.

GTX570 ordered
I've ordered a GTX570 to see how it performs. It should arrive next week.

Project news - Seti
They are back up and running. Maul picked up a fair bit of cuda work and is busily working its way through it. Its got enough for a couple of days.

Maul
As mentioned above its got a heap of cuda work from Seti. Its also got a heap of Einstein cpu work to get through. Fortunately its finished all the Seti cpu work, so all cores can concentrate on clearing the backlog. It doesn't help that its usually off during the day due to the heat.

5th of December

2010-12-05T18:08:00.003+11:00

Milestones
Nothing new this week

BOINC testing
We're up to 6.12.8 this week. So far no issues. They are looking at this one being released soon.

Project news - Seti
New servers have been switched over, except for the science database one (they were copying it from the old machine just before the weekend). We got some resends of old timed-out work on Friday. I managed to get 2 work units, which were promptly done and returned.

Computing focus
Currently Einstein is the most reliable project.

Seti will come back on-line next week so I will be able to do some work on a couple of machines for it.

Climate Prediction I am trying to finish off the 3 remaining work units on 2 machines which usually get switched off during the day (due to the weather).

Orbit doesn't have any work currently.

GPUgrid have issues with their app that cause the machines to crash, so i'm not doing any work for them at the moment. Things aren't so good at the moment with their cuda 3.1 app crashing and their 10 hour work units. I might put old drivers on the 2 machines with GTX295's to see if that resolves their app issue.

28th of November

2010-11-28T13:09:00.004+11:00

Milestones
Nothing this week.

Future plans
At the moment I will look at getting a GTX570 to see how they go. If the GTX570 seems to be reasonable (price/performance) then I will look at one for each of the i7's except Maul. They will replace whatever each one has (2 x GTX295, 1 x GTX275 and 1 x GTX460). The GTX460 will get put into one of the quaddies.

Project news - GPUgrid
They have updated their science application program to cuda 3.1. However it crashes on my machines with multi-gpu cards (ie Kirk and Sulu). They both have GTX295's installed. I have ceased running GPUgrid on them for the time being. I suspect this is caused by a bug in cuda 3.1 where it gets confused as to which device is running the app. They are in the process of creating a cuda 3.2 app so this may resolve the issue, but its not ready yet.

They are also seeking donations so they can get a GTX580. They are available from their supplier (in Spain) from the 1st of December. I made a donation to help them get one.

Project news - Seti
Well their two new servers are in. One has been fired up as the BOINC database server and the other is set to become the science database server. They are expecting to copy the science database over to the new machine next week.

Weather
Its been fairly warm and humid most of the week. As a result all the machine have been switched off during the day. This of course means not much work is getting done at the moment.

Add to this some ClimatePrediction work that takes 250 hours a work unit and it makes things a bit more complicated. I have been favouring the machines with CPDN tasks to try and get them all finished.

20th of November

2010-11-20T22:57:00.001+11:00

Milestones
Nothing this week either.

Cuda 3.2 released
Nvidia finally released the cuda 3.2 toolkit. Its been in release candidate mode for a while. Now its available to the public.

The Seti optimisers have created a test app to try some different algorithms using the cuda 3.2 toolkit. As I have a few different types of graphics cards I ran it on all of them and reported the results. Hopefully this will lead to further optimisation of the science apps.

GPUgrid switching to cuda 3.2
The GPUgrid guys are also in the process of getting apps compiled using the cuda 3.2 toolkit. At the moment their cuda 3.1 app fails on my GTX295 rigs. I suspect this is the cuda bug where it gets confused as to which device is running the app, as it works fine on the single gpu machines. That means I can only run GPUgrid work on Spock (GTX460) and Chekov (GTX275) for the time being.

GTX570
No its not out yet. Supposedly coming in December. Its reportedly 480 cuda cores and based on the GF110 chip, which the GTX580 uses. Should be good for crunching if the price is right. I will look at getting one once the hype of a new release dies down and stock becomes readily available.

Maul HDD upgrade
I replaced the hard disk in Maul today. Not a big deal to install it, but rather the hassle of reinstalling Windows 7 the way I had it. Anyway its all done, so its got a little bit more disk space now. The old disk was a 320Gb and the new one has 500Gb, however I don't use much disk space on the crunchers.

Seti servers arrived
The 2 machines that we did the fund raisers for have arrived. They have got 1 up and running as a replica database and will see how it runs for the next couple of days. I also did a top-up donation so that they can get some additional hard disks.

13th of November

2010-11-13T16:04:00.003+11:00

Milestones
None reached. Things have been rather slow as most of the machines are off. What little crunching is taking place is on Einstein and ClimatePrediction as they have longish deadlines.

BOINC testing
We got up to 6.12.6 this week. They made a few changes to job scheduling in 6.12.5 around multi-threaded apps (MT). They have refined it a bit with this latest one. I've got it installed on Maul at the moment. Its working fine, but then I don't run MT apps.

GTX580 released
Well Nvidia released the GTX580. Its got 512 shaders (what the GTX480 was supposed to have) and runs somewhat cooler. They cost $680 (AUD) at the moment, so I won't be buying one anytime soon.

Weather
It turned hot this last week, so all the machines have been off during the day, with one or two running overnight.

Last week we had a thunderstorm blowing rain in through the loft window. It was only open 2 inches and its in the roof line (ie it slopes down at 35 degrees) so the rain was blowing up and in. The two computers close to the window were getting water on them before I got the window closed. I then had to shut them all off because of the heat.

30th of October

2010-10-30T22:38:00.006+11:00

Milestones
I reached 5 million for Einstein. Below is my certificate

Nvidia drivers
They released 260.89 last week and 260.99 this week. Both as WHQL. Unfortunately they down-clock on non-Fermi cards after 30 mins. As a result i've gone back to the 258.69 drivers for all my non-Fermi rigs (which is pretty much all of them).

Project news - GPUgrid
They are up and running with a bunch of longer running work units. They take around 10 hours each. Given the short deadlines (5 days) the lower-end graphics cards have problems completing these in the timeframe.

They are planning on introducing a cuda 3.2 based app, when Nvidia release the developer toolkit (its under a NDA at the moment). They will drop the cuda 3.0 and 3.1 apps. They will contine with a cuda 2.3 based app as well for those running older cards/drivers.

Project news - Seti
Well they are up in a very limited capacity now. No new work, but people can upload completed work and report it.

They've ordered 2 HP servers to replace the couple of faulty database machines. Expected delivery is 2 weeks, and then another 2 weeks to migrate stuff onto them.

Maul
Last week there was an annoying clicking sound coming from Maul about every 6 seconds. A couple of days later I got an error reading one of the data files. So putting 2 and 2 together I decided the hard disk drive might be at fault. I run some disk diagnostics and it doesn't find anything wrong. I decided to order a replacement HDD as I don't have any spare SATA drives. The one in it is from a few years back, in fact its the only original bit of hardware left in it now.

The next day i'm standing at the KVM and look over at Maul and notice the fan on the front isn't turning and the click sound comes each time as it tries to turn. I power it off and remove a power cable that was poking into the 20cm fan and preventing it from turning. Power up and off we go without the clicking sound.

I now have a few spare drives (500Gb WD Caviar Blue). I'll probably remove the old one and install the new one in about a week. I don't want to change the hardware too much in one go so that Windows activation doesn't think its got a new machine.

24th of October

2010-10-24T00:55:00.003+11:00

Milestones
Nothing reached this week

BOINC testing
We're up to 6.12.4 this week. It fixed a couple of things and introduced another annoying problem. It doesn't look like its ready for release yet, but not too far off it.

Maul returns
As mentioned last week Maul went back to the shop for a CPU upgrade. Its now back and crunching away.

Project news - Climate Prediction
They have space problems. They filled up one of their servers. They have ordered an additional storage system which is due to be installed this coming week.

They also have a bunch of new models being run as a continuation of one of their earlier experiments.

Project news - Seti
Well their BOINC database server was pronounced dead. Another one has been ordered. As a temporary measure they have turned what was the replica database machine into the primary. Hopefully the new server will arrive quickly and things can get back to normal.

With the rearrangements they aren't creating work (although there was some ready to send anyway) and they have placed restrictions on how much work one can get, Network connections are suprisingly quick as they backoff off for 5 minues after each scheduler request.

16th of October

2010-10-16T17:07:00.003+11:00

Milestones
Not really a milestone but I passed 45 million for all projects.

Maul in the shop
Yep, he's back in the shop. This time for a CPU upgrade. Going from a Core i7-920 to a i7-950. I'd really like a 970 but they are around $1300.00 (AUD) just for the chip. I'll pick it up next weekend barring any problems.

BOINC testing
We're up to 6.12.2 this morning. I have it installed on 1 machine at the moment and it seems fine so far.

I have been running 6.11.9 for a while on all the machines with some strange behaviour when running GPUgrid TONI_KKi4 tasks. As these are new tasks I think its just the tasks causing the problems and not BOINC. Others are also having problems with these tasks.

Seti donation
Last week they were running a donation drive as it appeared they might need to replace a 2nd server. I made a donation then. However someone else came along with a higher amount early this week. Not to be outdone I decided to match it. Anyway it looks like they have the extra funds if they need them.

The server survived the onslaught with the network maxxed out all week until it was time for this weeks outage. Its back up at the moment and as usual the network it maxxed out again and its hard getting the work. Its allocated to the machine, but because of the overloaded network it simply cannot download.

Temperature
We've had a warm week so most of the machines have been off. Yesterday it cooled down so everything got fired up (yes, even Maul) and they are crunching away with the cache set small in case the warmer weather returns.

Windows updates
Microsoft have been busy plugging security holes. 49Mb per Win7 machine of updates. I've been trying to stagger these so as to not blow my internet download limit and not max-out my network connection.

10th of October

2010-10-10T21:34:00.002+11:00

Milestones
Nothing reached this week, although I did pass 28 million for GPUgrid.

Project news - Climate Prediction
Well like all the other projects it seems its their turn to run out of disk space. They have managed to fix their initial space problem and got uploads going. I've completed a few Famous climate models but can't report them until they fully resolve the issue.

Project news - Orbit
They have work but some issue with the scheduler has prevented us getting it. Unfortunately Pasquale was out of town for a presentation of the results and wasn't able to fix it remotely.

Project news - Seti
Seems another of their servers is playing up, possibly caused by their air conditioner failure 3 weeks ago. One of the regular volunteers, msattler, started another fund raising drive. We are hoping the money from this one and the previous one will be more than enough to get two servers instead of one.

Meanwhile Seti came up on Saturday (Sydney time) and the downloads have been maxed out for the entire weekend. Getting work is almost impossible at the moment. I managed to report last weeks work and got a few work units but have finished them all off.

BOINC testing
On Friday Kirk started doing crash dumps when running GPUgrid work. I reinstalled the video driver (which hadn't changed in 2 months) and that seemed to get it going. On Saturday Sulu started doing the same. I'm not too sure if its the new work units from GPUgrid (TONI_KKi4) or a bug with BOINC or Windows.

While poking around I noticed that Control panel was telling me I had an old version of BOINC installed from August. It would appear that it shows the version installed as an administrator and not the version installed as a standard user (which asks for an admin account/password). So I gave it admin rights, uninstalled and reinstalled. That gets Windows thinking it was running the right version.

I also uninstalled and reinstalled the video drivers as they too appeared to be an old version. Control panel was once again showing an old version and Windows update keeps offering me an updated video driver, but i'm already running the latest release version from nVidia.

3rd of October

2010-10-03T13:41:00.002+11:00

Milestones
None this week.

BOINC testing
Another couple of releases this week for testing. Current version is 6.11.9 now. I've got it installed on a few machines.

Project news - Einstein
They had a couple of glitches during the week but fixed them quickly. They have a problem with recent ABP work units not validating which they are working on. They aren't sure yet if they will have to redo the work or not.

Project news - GPUgrid
Their turn this week to run out of space on the upload server. They fixed it fairly quickly and we're back in business.

Project news - Orbit
We are just finishing off this weeks run. No new tasks available except resends. All machines except Maul have finished off their work. They are going to take a break for a week as they have a presentation of their results next week.

Project news - Seti
Seti spent all of last week off the air. They are now back online and i've managed to upload and report all my work from 2 weeks ago (along with the other 1 million or so participants). I've managed to get some work out of it since then as well.

26th of September

2010-09-26T14:42:00.004+10:00

Milestones
Not really a milestone, but I hit 27 million for GPUgrid.

Project news - Orbit
After last weekends outage they came back up around midnight Sunday (Sydney time). Since then we have finished off last weeks run, did another one during the week and judging by the number of work units ready to send we're on the 3rd run.

Project news - Seti
They went off the air due to filling up disk space on their upload server. They are in the process of rearranging servers, but will have to bring forward plans to next week. That leaves lots of work on peoples machines that we can't upload and report. There is no new work available to download.

The fund raiser was for a new science database server. They think they will be able to order it in about a weeks time and then a couple of weeks for delivery. After that probably another week or so for them to set it up the way they want.

Weather
Starting to warm up now we are in spring. Currently the loft is 28 degrees. As a result I have to cut back on processing.

BIOS updates
As I mentioned a couple of posts back I updated the BIOS on Chekov and Maul a couple of weeks ago. I ran around and did the rest of the machines this weekend to bring them all up to the same version.

19th of September

2010-09-19T00:43:00.002+10:00

Milestones
Nothing new this week.

Project news - Orbit
The completed their 1st run of 300,000 work units last week. The 2nd run of another 300,000 work units is underway.

Their server has crashed and the web site is down. For the 2nd run they are issuing the tasks to 2 computers and have a 3 day deadline (now likely to be missed). If not returned in time they will get reissued to another computer.

Project news - Seti
Their servers were off most of the week due to an air conditioner failure. They are now back online.

They have settled on a replacement science server that the fund raiser was for. I have put in $500 for them to get additional disk capacity (2Tb drives instead of 1Tb).

Nvidia beta drivers
They've been quiet for a while but have released new (beta) drivers. Version 260.63 supports cuda 3.2. They also have reworked their installer so that it can now do a clean install and not install certain components. Initial reports say it may be slightly quicker when running existing (cuda 2.3, 3.0 and 3.1) apps.

Cuda 3.2
As mentioned above the new drivers provide cuda 3.2 support. There is a non-disclosure agreement covering it, however rumours suggest the FFT libraries have been reworked for fermi-chips and provide substantial speed improvements.

GTX460
Last week the 2nd one was playing up. When I power up the machine it would tell me there wasn't a VGA card installed. Off to the shop it went. It of course worked for them, so I brought it back home today and will reinstall it later in the week.

14th of September

2010-09-14T20:53:00.004+10:00

Milestones
Passed 100,000 for Orbit.

Orbit
The farm has been concentrating on Orbit seeing as they had a small run of 300,000 work units, which seems to have now been completed. I was also running GPUgrid work as Orbit doesn't have a GPU application at the moment.

The SkySurvey app takes the i7's about 1 hour 26 minutes to complete. The project is set to replicate to 3 computers but the first 2 to return them get credit. If the last computer hasn't started it will be aborted by the project and if it has started it simply wastes its time. Not so good for the crunchers, but gives quicker turn-around for the project.

Due to the sheer number of work units flying around their server ran out of space for uploads last weekend. They managed to find room a few days later so we could upload completed work. Apparently they have requested extra funding for additional disk storage.

They are expecting to present their results in October and test it on real telescopes in mid-October, hence their need for results to be returned quickly.

GTX460 returned
I returned the 2nd card as it was giving errors when starting up the machine. Its symptoms were no display and the error beeps at power up indicate no VGA card found. I have put a GTX275 into Chekov to give it a usable GPU.

Of course it worked for the computer shop, but they are still trying to reproduce the error.

BIOS update
As part of the attempt to fix the problems with the GTX460 I downloaded the latest BIOS and installed it on Chekov. It made no difference. I also installed it on Maul as it has 3 x GT240 cards at the moment.

4th of September

2010-09-04T17:12:00.002+10:00

Milestones
Nothing new this week. Coming up on one for Seti, so I might concentrate on it for a little to get it "over the line".

Orbit
Remember them? Well they just dished out 300,000 work units and a new Sky Survey app. You don't hear a peep out of them for 6 months and then they just put out some work. The latest news item was in March.

The work units aren't too big to download, unlike some other projects. Current estimate to completion is 2 hours for my i7 machines, and they want to be back in 5 days. The last lot had a year to complete. Apparently they are planning on presenting the results at a conference in October.

Maul
Well I picked him up from the shop. He's been transplanted from a CoolMaster HAF 830 case to a CM Storm Sniper case. The power supply has been downsized from a Corsair 1000 watt to a Seasonic 750 watt. I still have to get him out of the box. I'm just waiting for one of the quads to finish off its Einstein work before I do that.

Quaddie trashes its work
For some reason BOINC decided to trash all the work I had on Qui-Gon. I had logged off as my normal BOINC user and switched to another user (to apply Windows updates) when it started up BOINC and deleted all the work units. Why it even started up I don't understand as the box for "always run at startup" was unchecked. When I log back on as the BOINC user its got no work. The logs have a heap of error messages.

Once its finished its Einstein work i'll detach and re-attach to release any work units that the 2 projects think its got. If I don't they will have to wait and time out.

29th of August

2010-08-29T21:41:00.003+10:00

Milestones
I passed 40 million for all projects this week.

GTX460
I removed the HD4850 from Chekov and installed the GTX460 into it. Its been running the usual mix of 4 projects on Chekov for most of this week. This makes 2 machines that now have GTX460's installed.

GPUgrid "fatty" tasks
They introduced a new batch of 500 workunits. These ones are twice the usual size. I managed to get one on a GTX295 which is looking like running for 12 hours. They are also in the process of ending one work stream and starting up new ones so there is a general shortage of work at the moment.

23rd of August

2010-08-23T00:36:00.004+10:00

Milestones
Nothing again this week. Crunching continues

Maul not home
I was supposed to pick up Maul after its case transplant, but the shop hasn't done it yet. It looks like next weekend now before it comes home. I did however pickup the 2nd GTX460 during the week.

BOINC testing
We had 6.11.6 released during the week, which incorporates a number of additions for the full functionality of notices. It looks pretty much the same as before from a users perspective. I have it running on Spock at the moment and will look at rolling it out to the others later.

Seti cuda optimised app
The guys at the Lunatics web site seem to be firming the x32f cuda 3.0 app for a release. They have asked us to concentrate on testing it. I previous tested the cuda 3.1 version and a later x32h version. I currently have 2 machines running it.

I managed to trash a cache of Seti work while updating the science app on Qui-Gon to x32h. Normally I wait until its finished all its work before updating a science app but because it was going to be almost a whole day before it finished I did it anyway, with the result that BOINC decided I didn't have the require apps and deleted all the work units.

With the Fermi-based cards you can run multiple instances of the app per card (assuming it has enough memory). I have been running 2 instances of the cuda 3.0 app at the same time, which finish marginally quicker than running a single instance.

GPU-Z 0.4.5
Below are a couple of screen shot of the GTX460 with the newer version of GPU-Z. This was while running 2 instances of the Seti x32f cuda 3.0 app.

As you can see from this last one the GPU is loaded up pretty much to the maximum.

15th of August

2010-08-15T22:08:00.005+10:00

Milestones
None this week. Number crunching continues for various projects.

Einstein finds a new pulsar
They seem to have found a new pulsar. Unfortunately it wasn't me, but it does show what distributed computing can do. There is also a suggestion there is a 2nd discovery which is currently being verified.

Link for details of the 1st discovery: http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/radiopulsar/html/discovery_page/firstdiscovery.html

Windows updates
They went overboard this week. Around 29Mb of updates for the Windows 7 machines (each) and around 12Mb for the Windows XP machines (each). So a lot of bandwidth was used up on these, not to mention the time for me to install them on each machine.

2nd GTX460
Chekov currently has an ATI HD4850 installed and is mostly dormant. I've ordered another GTX460 for it and will swap out the ATI card.

Seti beta cuda app testing
This is fairly quiet at the moment. A bug has been identified in cuda 3.1 that it is unable to work out which card is doing the work for FFT calculations and thus they fail in mixed-card machines. This will supposedly get corrected with cuda 3.2.

Maul progress
Its been transplanted into a CM storm Sniper case, which will make it look the same as the others at least. Its been done by the shop, but I need to collect it, which means it will have to wait until next weekend before it comes home.

7th of August

2010-08-07T19:30:00.005+10:00

Milestones
This weekend I managed to hit 1 million for ClimatePrediction. Below is my certificate.

BOINC testing
I've been running 6.11.4 for a couple of weeks now. There have been a few changes but no new build for over a week. Apart from some differences in the messages (now known as the event log) and such (new notices tab) its behaving pretty well. I've got it installed on all the machines except the XP ones (they are running the last "recommended" build - 6.10.58). They are still working on some of the features.

Maul back in the shop
Well he's back to the shop. This time its getting a CM Storm Sniper case and a 750w Seasonic power supply, which will make it the same as all the others. I still haven't worked out why it does its random reboots so this is probably the last thing to try.

Obi-Wan flat
Its been sitting around doing nothing for a while. When I fired it up again a couple of weeks ago I noticed the clock wasn't working. It needed to get a new battery. It takes a fairly standard battery, but of course it had to be in the most inaccessable place possible. Next to the PCIe slot which was occupied by a GTS250. After much jiggling I managed to get the GTS250 out and pop the battery out of its socket (at least it was in one). Down to the electronics shop to get a couple of new ones, pop it in. Another lot of jiggling to get the GTS250 back in and away we go. Amazingly it decided to work after that. I should be right for another 2 and a 1/2 years, which is how long the previous battery lasted.

Drobo
Well I got it and a few 2Tb hard disks. I ran out of ports on the back of the gigabit switch so i've had to buy another couple of them too. Its working as expected.

Seti snap fund raiser
It seems the guys at Seti were going to remove a couple of their old servers due to reliability issues. One of the regular volunteers, msattler, ran a snap fund raiser with various guys donating $1000 each so they could get a replacement server. Unfortunately I missed it (only spotted the message thread this morning) but will see if they need some other bits such as disk drives or memory that I can help with.

31st of July

2010-07-31T14:35:00.003+10:00

Milestones

I passed 20 million for GPUgrid this week. Below is my certificate.

Seti cuda app testing

I've been beta-testing a revised Seti cuda application on various machines, that have different graphics cards. There are both cuda 3.0 and 3.1 versions. I ran the cuda 3.1 version on a GTS250, GT240 and the new GTX460 card. All worked fine for me and were an improvement on the older app run time.

There have been reports of problems with mismatched graphics cards and Jason G has been trying to improve that area of the application. I expect a revised version for retesting.

Drobo

I'm looking at a Drobo for some additional storage. They are basically an external hard drive box. However unlike a normal external drive some versions hold up to 5 drives. You can mix drives and capacities and it handles the data redundancy by itself. They seem to be around $550 for the USB and $950 (prices in AUD) for the ethernet version with no drives. This seems a much simpler solution to adding storage capacity without having to build your own RAID array.

GTX460

2010-07-25T13:17:00.007+10:00

There are a few varieties of the GTX460. The main difference is in the memory sub-system. The 768Mb cards have a 192 bit memory controller and the 1Gb cards have a 256 bit memory controller. The other difference is in the cooling system. Evga has a couple of cards designated as EE (external exhaust), meaning they blow the air down the length of the card and out the back.

This one is an evga 768-P3-1362 model, which is one of the 768Mb cards but factory overclocked. From looking at the stats from GPU-Z it seems the memory controller isn't being stressed much by the GPUgrid app. It hovers between 15 and 17% use. Temps are being reported as being 50 degrees C under load, so fairly cool when compared with the GTX2xx cards.

As mentioned in the previous post it seems most software doesn't understand it has 336 cuda cores. They think it has 224 and therefore its under utilised. Even GPU-Z 0.4.4 reports it as having 224.

It was straight out of the box, take a few photos and then off to work. I swapped out the GTX275 from Spock as its the nearest equivilent card I have. Installed the driver and we're off and running.

Specifications
GPU: Nvidia GF104 running at 763 MHz, 336 CUDA Cores, 400 MHz RAMDAC
Memory: 768 MB, 192 bit GDDR5 3800 MHz (effective) 91.2 GB/s Memory Bandwidth
Interface: PCI-E 2.0 x16 DVI-I, DVI-I, Mini-HDMI
Dimensions: Height 111mm x Length 210mm

The box

Lying down

Connector end
Showing the dual DVI plugs, a mini-HDMI and you can see some of the heatsink.

Power connectors
The other end. You can see the 6 pin PCIe power connectors. Its rated at 150 watts max power use.

25th of July

2010-07-25T12:54:00.003+10:00

Milestones
None reached this week, but GPUgrid isn't far off one.

BOINC versions
We have the 6.11 family at the moment. 6.11.3 being the latest. Changes to the manager include a new Notices tab and the Messages tab has been removed. The messages have been relabelled as an Event log and open in a new window. The tasks tab columns have been rearranged.

Like anything new its causing some people angst, but I think its better. They will be adding RSS feeds into the Notices tab. Its still a work in progress.

GTX460
Well I got one of these. There are a few varieties of them. I will do a seperate blog post for this with some pictures.

GPUgrid science app
The guys from GPUgrid had a few problems with their app not working
a) for cuda 3.1
and
b) the GTX460

They have worked around the cuda bug and it will run with the GTX460's now. Performance is disappointing as it doesn't use all the cuda cores, but they will be addressing that after their summer break.

17th of July

2010-07-17T15:05:00.004+10:00

Milestones
I managed to hit 4 million credits for Einstein during the week. GPUgrid is coming up on another milestone too, but I will mention it when I get there.

Seti Limits
It appears the guys at Seti added limits on the number of tasks that can be distributed. This is so they don't overload their sever when the project comes up after a outage. They are currently having 3 day scheduled outages per week. They slowly increase the limits as the demand for work drops off. This way it allows all users a chance to get some work immediately following the outage.

GTX460 release
The long awaited GTX460 based on the GF104 was released last week. As expected the guys at GPUgrid are usually the 1st to rush out and get one. They are currently tweaking their science apps to work with it.

I was waiting for them and have ordered a Factory OC'ed one. Initial reports are promising about performance. They are also faily reasonably priced. The entry-level cards are around $200 USD.

BOINC versions
6.11 versions are now out for testing. Not sure whats in it as there hasn't been any mention of it in the mailing list. I'm still running 6.10.58 on my machines.

2nd of July

2010-07-03T20:33:00.002+10:00

Again no milestones reached this week. Crunching continues as normal.

Seti outage
Well the scheduled 3 day outage is over and we survived. There is still much angst over in the forums. This coupled with work fetch issues that have recently been intoduced by the latest incarnation of BOINC, which was being tested over at Seti beta, but suddenly got implemented on the main project. I'm sure Dr Anderson will have it sorted out in due course.

UPS
At the moment all the machines are on surge protected power boards. I've ordered a 700VA UPS to go onto the file server.

Network Reconfiguring
While I was at things today (applying windows updates on all the machines) I decided to try wiring up the network a bit differently.

All the number crunchers have 1Gbit LAN connections which then plug into a "Green" (ie low power) 1Gbit switch. After that it was going via the file server and then off to the router. Now the 1Gbit switch is plugged directly into the router. I'm hoping this will improve the comms speed.

GF104 due for release in July
Supposedly the official release date for the GF104 based Fermi cards is the 12th of July.

There are to be (initially) 2 versions. Both have 336 cuda cores. The reference design card having 768Mb RAM and a 192 bit memory interface. The other is a "nvidia partner" version having 1Gb RAM and a 256 bit memory interface. Expected power use is 150 watts for the reference design and 160 watts for the other version.

I would hope to try a "nvidia partner" version fairly soon after they are released. Rumour has it they have apparently killed off the GF100. Its being replaced by the GF104.

27th of June

2010-06-27T10:42:00.002+10:00

No milestones reached this week, just the usual crunching.

Seti@Home announces scheduled outages
They have announced that they will have scheduled outages from Tuesday through to Thursday each week, so they can concentrate on the science side of things.

This suggests to me that they have more crunching power than they require. At present I only have one machine doing S@H work so it will spend more time doing other projects. They already have issues supplying enough work to keep it occupied. We will see if this causes much grief. There is certainly much angst in the forums.

Internet throttling
This week I got my 1st throttle warning email from my ISP. Apparently they still had me listed as being on a 50Gb plan, despite my upgrading to the 100Gb plan when it came out over 15 months ago. Seeing I was no longer in a contract period and they now have 130Gb plans which don't count uploads, I switched to it. This should save me from future throttling.

Hardware issues
Maul still reboots from time to time. It seems to last about 3 days at a time. I still haven't managed to work out why. Since installing the newer nvidia 257.21 drivers it seems to be more stable, even though the times when it has rebooted it wasn't even doing any GPU work. Its also the only one running Seti work.

20th of June

2010-06-20T13:09:00.003+10:00

GPUgrid reaches 15M
This weekend I passed the 15 million milestone for GPUgrid. Things are bubbling along nicely there. See certificate below.

Seti and Seti-Beta woes
The BOINC developers were testing a number of changes to do with DCF (duration correction factors), work fetch and credit normalisation on Seti-Beta. They then seem to have implemented it on the main project without any warning. This is causing a number of issues with no credit being granted and machines not getting work any more. The DCF also varies wildly. All in all a total stuff up. From reading the forums a number of users are getting upset.

Fortunately I have only one machine doing Seti now, so i've simply set it to no new work and its concentrating on Einstein. I'll look at it again next week and see if they have managed to fix their issues. No point stressing about it and there are other more useful scientific projects that I can help.

CPDN
ClimatePrediction are now well into the Famous work units. I've managed to complete a few. They typically run for 260 hours on my i7 machines. I have disabled the smaller HADAM3P work units (they normally take 60 hours) as the project wants to get the Famous work completed in 4 months.

Maul
Well this machine is still playing up, typically rebooting at least once per day. I'll look into replacing the power supply and maybe the case next week.

Future hardware
At the moment i'm waiting to see the GF104 GPU's from nvidia. There are a number of rumours about their specs and pricing. The GTX460 sounds like it might be the card to go for when they become available. Expected release date is either June or July.

The i7-980x doesn't look like its going to drop in price any time soon. They are just too expensive at this point to bother with.

Still nothing from LucidLogix regarding their Adventure 2000 or Adventure 2500, so it looks like they are simply vapourware.

6th of June

2010-06-06T22:39:00.003+10:00

Its been a fortnight since the last update, so here's the news since last time...

GPUgrid errors fixed
The 2 machines that have GTX295's were getting errors when GPUgrid released their new 6.05 app. I tracked it down to having issues with SLI being enabled. If you disable SLI in the nVidia control panel they work fine, not to mention being a bit quicker.

Adventure 2500
I was keen to get hold of the LucidLogix Adventure 2500. Its basically an extension of the PCIe bus to an external box which provides an additional 4 PCIe slots. Emails to their sales department have gone unanswered.

We were discussing it and a similar product by Cubix over on the GPUgrid forums. The Cubix guys provided some additional information, but we can't get any information from LucidLogix.

BOINC versions
6.10.56 became the official version. Since then there is a 6.10.57 with a minor change to do with elapsed time calculations. I've put 57 on four of the machines and its working fine.

Mauls woes
He's paying the price for being bad. Well not really. It came back a fortnight ago. Since then its done its random reboots for no apparent reason. I've replaced the power cable and extension lead that he's plugged into but that doesn't seem to have made any difference. I even removed the 3rd GT240 from it in case that was causing problems.

I'm beginning to think it might have something to do with the case wiring as since the last time it was off at the shop the light in the power switch hasn't worked and the USB ports on the front panel have stopped working. Its a CM Stacker 830 case which is mostly aluminum and can be prone to short circuits. They are now discontinued unless I want the nVidia version (has an nVidia logo on the front and the grills are green instead of the usual black colour).

Weather
Getting cold (good for computers) and wet (not so good for computers). However managed to have 4 machines up and running for the last few weeks. This has improved the output from the farm quite nicely, with GPUgrid being the majority of it.

Milestones
I passed 500,000 for CPDN (Climate Prediction Network). It seems they've recently added a certificate shown below. I have also started running their Famous climate models. The HADAM3P models I have run up until now take around 60 hours. The Famous models take 165 hours. The good news is they don't have such huge files to transfer to get one going.

3rd week of May

2010-05-23T21:23:00.002+10:00

Another fairly quiet week on the farm.

Maul - he's back
Picked up Maul from the shop again. Its his 3rd trip. Got it home and lugged it up into the loft (climbing the ladder is always interesting with a big PC). As you can see from the previous pictures the case is a CoolerMaster HAF 932. Its not exactly light.

The shop replaced the motherboard for a new one. First bootup and it complained about the BIOS settings being invalid. So go and reset everything back the same as the other 4. This gets it booted and running. Previous Windows 7 still on there (fortunately not activated, only 2 days left).

Upgraded BOINC to 6.10.56 and got work and left it to run. A few hours later I noticed it had rebooted. Okay time to wipe it and reinstall. Formated the partitions, and reinstalled Win 7. Reinstall BOINC, copy backup of BOINC directory back onto it and its off and running again. So far its survived a full day crunching. Unfortunately Seti's upload server has gone off-line so can't upload completed work and it refuses to ask for new work (because it can't upload). The backup project on this machine (Einstein) is getting plenty of attention though.

BOINC testing
Well the testing continues. No new version as they are trying to get this one out as the "release" version. As mentioned last week pretty stable, haven't had any cause to complain.

Proxy Server
All the number crunchers communicate to the outside world through a proxy server. I last updated it about 18 months ago. I took the opportunity this weekend to update it to the latest production release. It was only 5 versions behind. Web access seems to be a little faster now too.

Weekly report

2010-05-16T13:20:00.002+10:00

Another week on the farm...

Maul ready to come home (again)
This time the they claim to have replaced the motherboard. The last motherboard was a "refurbished" one. When it gets back we'll see if it makes any difference. Half the city was closed off due to the arrival of Jessica Watson, so I couldn't pick it up this weekend.

BOINC versions
We are up to 6.10.56 this week. It seems that both the Nvidia and ATI drivers stop working if you keep polling them for free GPU ram details, so they've removed the checking from BOINC for now. Other than that it seems to be working fine. I would suspect this one will probably become the next release version.

Qui-Gon
Its an ACER veriton v7900. It seems to have well and truly died. Another dud motherboard. Still under warranty. So time to pack it back up and get it fixed. A visual inspection of the motherboard indicates that some of the capacitors appear to have cooked.

May day

2010-05-09T00:08:00.003+10:00

Maul back in the shop
It seems he just can't handle things when it gets under CPU load. Interestingly it works quite well running just GPU work, so something screwey with the motherboard. The shop seems to think that ASUS would have swapped the motherboard for a reconditioned one the last time it was in. Hopefully it won't take 2 months this time.

BOINC versions
We are up to 6.10.52 for Windows this week. The developers have been working on the file xfer limits. Unfortunately in its current form not much use to me. My ISP has a concept of peak and off-peak limits. Also i'd need to apply the limits across the entire "farm". I've put it on 2 of the machines and they have been working fine so far.

Obi-Wan returns
Given Maul is back in the shop and Qui-Gon is playing up I dug out another oldie and fired it up. All the quaddies have been sitting around gathering dust, so after reinstalling BOINC and then allowing Windows update to bring it up to date its off and running.

I hope this one lasts better than Qui-Gon, which works for about 2 days then starts beeping and needs 2 days rest before resuming work again. Another screwey motherboard.

Weekly news

2010-05-02T23:35:00.003+10:00

A few things in this weeks update:

New BOINC versions, old one pulled
Maul playing up
Project realignment
AMD releases the Phenom II x6
GTX260 donated

BOINC versions
Bad news first. UCB decided to pull the current release version (6.10.43) due to a work fetch issue. To get the issue you have to be running a project that has a cuda app and your graphics card has less than the required ram (typically 256Mb cards). If you have one then they recommend you go back to 6.10.18. If your graphics card has 512Mb or better then you won't have a problem, so there is no need to do anything.

New version 6.10.50 was released with a bunch of changes and a few broken bits. The notable change they are adding is the ability to set a file transfer quota, and when exceeded it will suspend communications. Unfortunately the enable/disable comms options are now broken, but they are aware of the problem. In fact they have already released an updated Mac version. We're still waiting on a Windows build.

Maul playing up
Well it came back with much fanfare, but hasn't really behaved since. Firstly the shop hasn't got the case wiring correct and the power button is no longer illuminated and the PC speaker no longer works. These are just an annoyance rather than an issue. The main problem is it keeps locking up when using all 3 graphics cards. I suspect its a BIOS issue and the P6T cannot cope with 3 GPU's going at once. At the moment i've removed the load from GPU3 (which is in the PCIe x4 slot) and will see how it goes. BOINC is only using 2 GPU's for now.

Project realignment
After a bit of experimenting with running the GPUgrid work on the GT240 cards in Maul I've decided they are way too slow (about 10 hours a wu). So i've set Maul to just run Seti and Einstein work. The other machines with the more capable cards are concentrating on GPUgrid work.

Orbit would appear to be generating some beta-test work units while they sort out a new app. Once thats done they are expecting to generate real work. Its taken some years to get to this point, so i'm not holding my breath.

AMD releases Phenom II x6
While its somewhat behind Intel, the AMD doesn't do hyper-threading, so each core is an actual cpu. The release in itself this isn't significant, other than it may convince Intel to drop its prices for the i7 980x.

GTX260 donated
I've donated one of Maul's old GTX260 cards to one of the developers of the optimised apps for Seti@home. Most of the guys don't have a high-end card so cannot test their optimisations without help from others. I am hoping this will allow for more optimisation of their cuda app.

Maul pics

2010-04-25T21:34:00.010+10:00

While Maul was off in the shop I got them to replace the graphics cards. The new ones are the evga GT240 as you can see below.

The card is a single-slot design so its possible to put 3 of them into the Asus P6T motherboard. It doesn't use any external power connectors either.

And this is what it looks like once they have all been installed into the CoolerMaster 932 case.

Another shot taken at a different angle.

And another shot from the front of the case.

Here is the GPU-Z report for them. The first two cards run at PCIe x16 speed and the third one runs at PCIe x4 speed, other than that they are identical.

Speed-wise they are slower than the GTX260's but then you can't get the GTX260's any more. They only have 96 shaders (now called cuda cores) so they are theoretically less than half the speed, but the GDDR5 memory system helps to make up for some of that. I have run some GPUgrid work that comes in over 10 hours, where a GTX295 takes 6 hours.

Another "feature" to note is that under Windows Vista and 7 you need to put vga dummy plugs onto the 3rd card before it can be used. I asked in my computer shop for one and they had never even heard of them. All they are is a couple of resistors in a vga plug to simulate load.

A quiet week

2010-04-21T22:43:00.004+10:00

A fairly quiet week production-wise. I've been leaving one machine on during the day and the rest off. In the evenings I usually fire up a 2nd one, which operates until its time to head off for work.

GPUgrid
They released a new science app 6.72 which is meant to be faster. However the 3 work units that I got so far were the long variety that take 10+ hours, so its a bit hard to tell.

Maul ready to come home
Maul (its an ASUS P6T) has been off at the shop since February. Its motherboard has been back to ASUS twice. Anyway its come back. Funny thing though, the shop rang me to tell me Win 7 isn't working. I asked why as it was working when I dropped the machine off. They couldn't explain why.

Its had 2 old GTX260 cards removed and 3 GT240 cards installed. The CPU fan has been replaced by a Noctua and the old CPU fan is now blowing air out of the top of the case. The memory should be 6Gb this time.

Nvidia GTX470 and GTX480
It seems very few of the science apps will work with them. A couple of projects have managed to get them to work. There is a alpha-test Seti multibeam app that runs. The GPUgrid apps all fail, but a member has donated a 470 and a 480 to them so they can work out why their science app doesn't work.

There also seems to be some confusion with drivers. The latest 197.45 (WHQL) driver doesn't support them, but there is a 197.41 that does. No doubt nvidia will sort things out in due course, but I am not wasting the money on one at the moment.

GPUgrid zooms past

2010-04-09T22:14:00.004+10:00

This week GPUgrid cracked 9 million credits. It also passed my Seti credits (last week they hit 9 million). I've been crunching Seti since February 2008 and GPUgrid since December 2008.

BOINC versions
This week saw 6.10.43 pronounced the "release" version for Windows and Linux and 6.10.44 for the Mac. Following on from that 6.10.45 came out with a few minor fixes that just missed the 43 version. I've got 43 on two machines and 45 on another, the rest are switched off. Both versions are working fine.

Maul
He's still off getting fixed. Its only been 6 weeks so far. Apparently ASUS fixed it once, something to do with the BIOS (even though it had been updated a couple of times). As mentioned in my 1st of April post it was damaged in transit and has gone back to be fixed yet again.

GT240 cards
I was looking to get 2 or 3 of these to replace the aging GTX260's that were in Maul. Apparently the GDDR5 ones are about 2/3rds the speed of a GTX260, which is pretty good considering they have have less than half the number of shaders (now known as cuda cores) of a 260. They also use a lot less power and are single slot cards (well the evga ones are). The shop are supposedly finding out more details (like pricing and availability) for me.

Seti passes 9 million

2010-04-05T09:31:00.004+10:00

Despite concentrating on GPUgrid for most of the long weekend I managed to reach the 9 million milestone for Seti. Things have been returned to normal (ie no more manual intervention).

GPUgrid
As mentioned above I was concentrating on GPUgrid for most of the long weekend. The guys there have been trying to test some new applications that are a bit faster than the current one. They also tried a cuda 3 version to support the newer Fermi-based cards. Unfortunately the cuda 3 apps crashed straight away, so they have gone back to using the cuda 2.2 and cuda 2.3 versions.

Qui-Gon playing up
This is a quad-core machine with a GTS250 card in it. It was working most of last week without any problems. On Friday it decided it wasn't going to work any more and had a constant beep from its speaker and not even a BIOS screen. It did this a fortnight ago when I cleaned it out. I left it off for 2 days. Its now back up and running. I don't know why it does this. The CPU temperature seems to be around 43 degrees according to the BIOS readings.

Fermi released

2010-04-01T21:19:00.004+11:00

The offical launch of the Fermi-based cards was last week. I have been checking pricing on the GTX470, which seems to be as low as $500 AUD. Still about $100 more than it should be, and nobody has any stock until April the 12th at least! Its too expensive for me, so I will wait a bit in the hope the price will drop further.

Project news: GPUgrid
It seems a reviewer has been trying a GTX480 over at GPUgrid. The project has 2 science apps, one worked, one didn't. The developers over there been updating their apps to support the Fermi-based cards., which includes upgrading to the newer cuda 3 libraries.

They are also seeking a card (or cards) to be donated. The developers posted the reply from nvidia. It seems nvidia weren't interested unless GPUgrid had recently purchased a Tesla, which of course they hadn't.

Other news
Not much to report this week. The weather cooled down a bit so I have managed to get Kirk and Sulu running all day for the last couple of days. They both have a single GTX295 so they can do a fair bit of cuda work.

BOINC also had a minor issue with the newer Fermi-based cards as it wasn't correctly reporting some card details at start up. Its just a cosmetic bug which they have already corrected.

Maul loses capacitor
The shop told me Maul should be fixed by the end of the month. It still hasn't come back. Apparently when they shipped the motherboard back to the distributor a capacitor had come off. It was working properly, apart from the 4Gb memory limit, when I returned it to the shop.

Unfortunately all the work on Maul will have timed out by now. It was completed but not reported due to problems with the Seti servers at the beginning of March.

Climate milestone

2010-03-22T21:40:00.002+11:00

I managed to get to 250,000 for Climate Prediction this week. I think thats pretty good considering they take around 60 hours per work unit. Unfortunately they don't have a certificate.

Fermi
I've asked the computer shop to see how many Fermi based cards they are likely to be getting. They think it will be something like 20, but don't have a confirmed allocation at the moment, nor do they know what sort of cards they will be (GTX480 or GTX470). Add to that they don't know pricing either. Anyway i've asked for two GTX470's, depending on the price and availability of course.

Qui-Gon returns
Seeing as Maul is still off with the distributor I fired up Qui-Gon (an Acer quad-core machine). It was working fine for a while then it decided to reboot and keep the fans running at full speed. I went into the BIOS as it shows the CPU temperature. It looked fairly normal to me. I used a can of air and blew out the heatsink just in case. After that it refused to boot. That is until tonight when I tried it, a week after dusting it out. It booted up first go and is back to crunching some Einstein work.

BOINC versions
We had 6.10.39 last week and then it jumped up to 6.10.43 with a bunch of changes in the space of a couple of days. I've got it on two machines and it seems to be working fine. It has a number of improvements to the amount to CPU time the core client spends managing tasks.

Electricity
It seems the NSW state government has decided to bail out the electricity generators. They announced a 64% price increase over 3 years. This is on top of last years price increase to fund infrastructure upgrades.

GPUgrid hits 8 million

2010-03-11T22:11:00.002+11:00

Well I managed to crack the 8 million milestone for GPUgrid. Below is my certificate.

GPUgrid bonuses
They have tweaked the bonus so that its 50% if the work is returned within one day and 25% if returned with two days. This is to encourage more work to be returned as soon as possible. The results of one lot of work units are used to build the next set of work units, so they need them back ASAP.

Another quiet week

2010-03-07T15:51:00.003+11:00

Another fairly quiet week on the farm. The weather warmed up so only one machine was left running (Kirk). I was away for a few days and left it to do its thing. When I came back the room temperature was 33 degrees but it was still going :-) Anyway I turned it off and waited for things to cool down.

BOINC news
We got up to 6.10.36 earlier in the week. This has now become the recommended for all systems except Linux.

I like the resume of uploads. Climate Prediction and GPUgrid produce some big result files to upload and if the transfer is suspended it used to restart from the beginning, now it resumes from where its up to.

Another feature that may interest some people is the concept of a backup project (for those that want to crunch for a single project). It will only use the backup project when its out of work and can't get any for the primary project.

Maul off to be replaced
As mentioned last week Maul (its a ASUS P6T) went back to the shop. They have determined its a faulty motherboard and will be sending it off to the distributor. Hopefully it will get replaced fairly quickly. It still has a fair bit of work on it that was completed but couldn't be reported for Seti due to their last major outage.

Fermi firms up
Pricing it seems is based upon whatever they can get for it. Indications are the GTX480 will be $680 USD and GTX470 will be $299 USD. These are expected to be released in limited numbers only so the odds of getting one are fairly low. If certain web sites are to be believed then there will be less than 10,000 made.

Autumn. Time for crunching

2010-03-01T22:09:00.004+11:00

Not much to report this week. Weather was warm to hot until today, when like someone has thrown a switch its back to colder weather. Its also the 1st day of autumn. Being cool and wet has meant temps are down, so I have got 3 machines running as I type this.

Maul. No verdict
Checked with the computer shop on Friday to see if they have managed to find anything out about Maul and its 4Gb memory limit. They have some parts coming in so haven't managed to try certain things yet (like removing the cpu). They expect to swap the cpu for another one, if only temporarily, to see if that resolves things this week.

They did the obvious things like change the memory, but then i'd already ruled that out by using a known good set that I took out of Sulu, and have since put back.

BOINC news
I did offer my services as an alpha tester but never got a reply back. Hello Rom.

There are some rumblings of discontent by certain users. All very nice complaining, but none are volunteering to do any coding. If they really wanted to improve it then they should start doing something about it.

The current beta version is 6.10.35. Just a few minor changes in this one, so I haven't bothered putting it on any machine. In fact the most up to date machine was Maul and its off at the shop now.

20 million and counting

2010-02-21T01:17:00.004+11:00

Despite a quiet week on the computing front I managed to hit the 20 million milestone this week. Below in a FreeDC image of my latest stats.

Maul in the shop
Given all the problems getting Maul to recognise 6Gb of memory its back at the shop. A google search turned up some forum post mentioning "bent pins". This would suggest a bent pin or two on the cpu socket. Seeing as the shop put the machine together they can sort it out. ASUS provide a 3 year warranty as do Intel, so the components are under warranty.

Seti long outage
I had some Seti work on Maul which I have been trying to get off it before sending it to the shop. Unfortunately they have had a few problems, one after the other. I managed to upload the results, however couldn't report them. Its been like that for about 4 days now. I have set the other machines to No New Work for Seti so they don't bother until the project is back to normal.

Fermi
While I was in the shop dropping off Maul I had a discussion regarding the upcoming Fermi (aka GF100) gpu chip. They have been advised by their supplier to expect some stock at the end of March. This initial chip is supposedly 20% faster than a ATI 5870. It is expected to be followed in May with another version that is 30% faster. After that they are expecting a dual-chip card to come out. All are meant to be faster than a GTX295. No indication on if they will actually have stock or how much they will cost.

Intel i7-980x
According to web reports these are due out on the 16th of March. Apparently slated for the Mac. Its a hex core with hyperthreading, so 12 cores on a chip. Its clocked at 3.3Ghz. Indicative pricing is $999 USD. Given the pricing I don't think i'll be getting one anytime soon.

More memory woes

2010-02-13T20:53:00.005+11:00

Well I got 4 sets of memory from the shop this week, replacements for the 2nd lot of duds. I put one set into Sulu and left the memory tester running. All good, so onto Maul. Not so good. All 3 sets failed. Came up as 4Gb instead of 6Gb.

At the moment what I might do, when I can run its cache of work down, is to take the memory out of Sulu and stick it into Maul. If that works then its probably the memory. If it fails then its probably just Maul.

Update: Swapped memory out of Sulu into Maul and it still reports as 4Gb. So its something about Mary, I mean Maul. Swapped it back, put original 1Gb x 3 back into Maul and we are back at square one.

Weather
Or should that be whether to run or not? Its been hot and sticky again this week, raining in the evenings, so all the machines have been off for most of the week, with some occasional runs overnight. Not much science done this last week.

Project news: GPUgrid
New faster app released to the public. Its claimed to be up to 60% faster, but I think thats if your cpu has nothing else to do. Unfortunately mine are busy running cpu tasks as well as the gpu tasks, so its nowhere near that figure.

It also didn't resolve the FFT issues with the 65nm GTX260's (which Maul has a pair of). I didn't expect it to as its really an Nvidia issue.

Project news: Einstein
They have release a new app that takes 4 ABP work units at a time, so they take 4 times as long to run. This in turn relieves some of the stress on the server.

BOINC testing
Some changes are afoot. They are planning on doing nightly automated builds. They are also looking for some more people who'd like to do alpha testing, preferably with a fair bit of experience with BOINC. That reminds me I should install 6.10.32 on one of the machines to test it.

Einstein reaches 3 million

2010-01-28T22:56:00.004+11:00

Finally I managed to get Einstein to the 3 million milestone. Below is a rather faint copy of the certificate.

Memory (or lack of)
The shop still hasn't replaced the memory. It was meant to be available and tested by Monday. Monday came and went and when I rang they admitted it hadn't even arrived. Tuesday was a public holiday. So the other couple of machines (Sulu and Maul) await their memory upgrades.

BIOS upgrades
I've been on the ASUS web site tonight checking for what BIOS version is the current one. Apparently the one I installed (ver 0202) dates back to January 2009. The current one seems to be 1004 and is dated January 2010. It still doesn't support the i7-980x, so I may as well wait until they have a version that does.

Progress report
Well not much to report due to having machines off. Its hot and humid here in Sydney. As mentioned above Einstein got to its milestone.

Project news: Einstein
The guys at Einstein have been busy developing a new ABP (Arecibo Binary Pulsar Search) science app. This uses less double precision maths and is therefore somewhat faster.

They have also indicated there is a new Gravity Wave search program in the works. This is expected to cut run times down from around 8 hours to 3 hours. It won't be deployed until the next search run (S5R7).

Project news: GPUgrid
The guys at GPUgrid have been optimising their science app. There is a newer version in the works that is supposed to be up to 60% faster that the current one. They have also been trying to move away from using the CuFFT libraries provided by nvidia.

Unfortunately their testing of an OpenCL version of their science app proved that OpenCL on the ATI cards is not ready yet. Apart from being somewhat slower than a CUDA app, the ATI software causes system hangs or reboots. Hopefully later versions will correct these issues.

Out of memory

2010-01-18T23:25:00.004+11:00

Memory
I bought 4 sets of RAM upgrades. However when I tried them all four reported 4Gb instead of 6Gb when installed in Maul. Thinking this was a little suspicious I installed one set in Sulu, which found 6Gb, however when I ran a memory tester on it, I started getting errors. So back to the shop they went.

I have suggested I will start charging them if I get another faulty batch. No news yet from them regarding replacements. If there is no output from a memory test with the next lot i'm not even taking them out of the shop.

Graphics cards
Maul has a couple of old GTX260's (the 65nm variety). Unfortunately these don't work with the GPUgrid science app due to bugs with Nvidia's FFT cuda routines. They are also over a year old and starting to get clogged with dust. If I can't clean them out, which requires some disassembly, i'll need to replace them. My options at the moment are:

Replace them with newer GTX260's (55nm). Approx AUD $300 each
Replace them with a GTX295 (if I can get a single PCB card). Approx AUD $600

I was hoping Nvidia would have the GT300 (aka Fermi) cards available by now, but they still seem to be having issues. Rumours suggest that they get too hot so they have had to reduce the number of shaders. Don't expect to see these coming off the production line any time soon.

BOINC versions
6.10.29 was released with a number of modifications, most notably to the work-fetch side of things. I've installed it on 3 machines, which would appear to be working fine so far.

Plans for 2010
As far as future (potential) upgrades this year go its currently looking like:

1. Upgrade Intel i7-920 CPU's to Intel i7-980x (aka the i9)
2. Upgrade graphics cards to GT300 based ones, if Nvidia gets its act together

Progress this fortnight
Not a great deal. The machines have mostly been off during the day and only a couple running overnight due to the heat. I have been running a number of climateprediction work units which take 60 hours each. This is in addition to my usual mix of Einstein, GPUgrid and Seti work.

Einstein news
I still haven't managed to get Einstein to the 3 million credit milestone yet. Its currently on 2.98 million. Hopefully by next week i'll be able to get it to this milestone.

They have released a new ABP science app that uses a lot more single-precision maths, thus making it a lot faster and run times have reduced quite dramatically.