26th of September

Farm status
CPU only
Doing Rosetta work overnight.

Nvidia GPUs
Doing Rosetta overnight and Einstein in the morning.

Raspberry Pis
Doing Einstein and Rosetta work.

For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster


3060 Ti news
I have (had) four machines with GTX 1660 Ti's installed. I am trying to get them all upgraded now there is stock available. The RTX 3060 Ti has been working out about 30% faster. I ordered a 3rd 3060 Ti which has already been installed. They use more power, run a bit hotter and there is more fan noise from them.

I ordered my second card 3 weeks ago, from a shop I don't normally deal with. They still have them listed as pre-order. I asked for an update and they replied they don't have any stock and don't know if or when they will be getting any. Meanwhile the price has gone up $200 since I ordered my first one so I will leave it on order and they will have to deal with the price increase. I don't expect the prices will drop any time soon.

I will wait a week or so to see if my regular shop runs out of stock again before placing another order. The shops are limiting GPU sales to one per household so I have to order one at a time which adds to the shipping cost. The other couple of computer shops I deal with either don't sell the EVGA brand or if they do sell them don't have any. I could also use an ASUS Dual model but nobody seems to have them in stock, although they have other ASUS models available.

5th of September

Farm status
CPU only
Off.

Nvidia GPUs
Running Einstein and Milkyway GPU work in the mornings.

Raspberry Pis
Running Einstein.

For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster


Other news
As mentioned in my last post I got an EVGA RTX 3060 Ti. I have managed to pre-order a second card from another supplier today. It doesn't say when they will be in stock, however most shops aren't accepting pre-orders until they know they are getting stock. I still need another two cards.

I was informed the 10GbE switch which I have on back-order is not expected until November now.

I upgraded the remaining Nvidia GPU machines to Debian Bullseye after using the 3060 Ti machine as a guinea pig. Everything worked pretty much the same as before apart from updated software packages. Its not so much as an upgrade but rather a clean install of the latest version.

In project news Rosetta ran out of work again. They had 4 million work units in the queue but it seems a particular variant of the work had a bug and crashes within 60 seconds so they have millions of failed work units.

29th of August

Farm status
CPU only
Running Rosetta overnight.

Nvidia GPUs
Running Einstein in the morning and Rosetta overnight.

Raspberry Pis
Pi3's running Einstein. Pi4's running Einstein and Rosetta.

For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster

For news on my Chia Plotting see Marks Adventures in Chia


Other news
I managed to buy one EVGA RTX 3060 Ti. Hopefully it will provide a performance improvement over my GTX 1660 Ti's. Its totally overpriced but its from one of my usual computer shops so it comes with a warranty. Now all I need is another 3 to replace the rest of my 1660 Ti's. I need to upsize the power supply in the machine that its going to get the 3060 Ti. I already have four 850 watt power supplies ready to install.

I have now updated both the Ryzen 5900X machines to Debian bullseye. I also updated one of the Nvidia GPU machines without issue so far, apart from all the projects assuming its a new host and having to merge it with the previous one. The exception is CPDN which doesn't allow deleting old hosts, nor merging any with a difference (like OS version).


Update 31 Aug 2021
The RTX 3060 Ti arrived. I swapped the old power supply (550 watt) for a new 850 watt one. I swapped the old GPU out for the 3060 Ti. The old GPU will be sold to offset the cost of the new one.

Running slow

Farm status
CPU only
Off

Nvidia GPUs
Idle. Have been doing some Einstein in the morning.

Raspberry Pis
Pi3's running Einstein. Pi4's running Einstein and Rosetta.

For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster


Other news
Its been quite warm so I've had the CPU only machines off. Partly due to the weather and partly due to Rosetta not having any work. Rosetta now have work.

As mentioned in my last post I have a 10GbE switch on back-order. It is supposedly arriving next week but given all the chip shortages I expect it won't. All of the compute nodes should have at least a 2.5GbE connection but now some machines are back on 1GbE. The new switch should have an SFP+ port so I may be able to use a fibre connection between the old and new 10GbE switches. While the speeds are the same SFP and SFP+ have much better latency than cat6 cabling.


OS upgrades
Debian released bullseye on the 14th of August. I've found a bug where the desktop has high CPU usage if you log into the console as root, at least on amd64 with the mate desktop. I've raised a bug report for it (#991994) although there is no acknowledgement they're looking at it. They might be swamped with issues.

I have upgraded one of the CPU only machines this morning, well it was a clean install really. This gives an updated BOINC client and Linux kernel as well as the various OS updates.

Pi-hole doesn't work properly under bullseye at the moment. You can install it if you disable the OS version checking and then the pihole-FTL service doesn't start automatically. One of their scripts is using the "service restart" command which no longer exists. I changed it to a "systemctl restart" which fixes the restart issue at least. The Raspberry Pi Foundation also haven't updated to bullseye yet. I suspect the pi-hole developers will wait until that happens before they update their code. Pi-Hole was originally written for the Raspberry Pi but is also available for other ARM and x86_64 Linux versions.

I had some issues with squid not being able to create its cache directories, but after purging it and reinstalling managed to get it to work.