27th of May

Farm status
CPU only
Running Rosetta overnight

Nvidia GPUs
Running Einstein in the morning (GPU) and Rosetta (CPU) overnight

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

For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster


Other news
I've decided I might have a crack at Chia farming. I figure I have plenty of disk space so might as well use it. I've taken the Toms Hardware budget PC build as a basis along with an idea from Sloth Tech TV (on YouTube). The parts I have ordered are:

ASUS Z590M-P motherboard
Intel i5-11400 CPU
Noctua CPU cooler

I'm going to repurpose an old case/power supply. I have spare memory and M.2 SSD which will be the boot drive. I also ordered some pre-loved 300GB 10K SAS hard disks and a set of cables off eBay. The idea is the SAS drives will be used for the work space. I already have a SAS controller. The drives only cost $17 each (AUD) plus shipping so I ordered 4. I figure it can do 3 plots at a time with staggered starts so I only need 3 drives with the fourth being a spare. If the SAS drives don't work out I'll look at using a U.2 drive instead. If it turns out to be a flop then I can always use the PC for number crunching.

I've started a separate blog for the Chia farming: Marks Adventures in Chia

 

Update 28 May 2021
First problem. SAS cables arrived and they have the wrong connector. My fault. The SAS controller doesn't come with a printed manual and it doesn't say on the box what connector its got. I had to lookup the manual for the controller to find out it has an SFF-8643 connector. I have now ordered another set of cables.


Update 1 June 2021
Second problem. Replacement SAS cable arrived along with 4 x 300GB SAS hard disks. SAS cable works fine. Two hard disks report multiple errors and cause the controller to refuse to boot the machine. The 3rd drive reports errors when writing. The 4th drive sounds like its doing retries. That is 3 out of 4 drives failed. I contacted the eBay seller and he promptly refunded me for three of the drives. I suspect they got damaged during shipping as they were just wrapped in thin bubble wrap and a layer of cardboard.

Having been turned off pre-loved disks I have ordered a new SAS drive to see if it works with my controller. These days some companies are signing their firmware to make sure you only use their products. If it works I will buy another two and if not I'll be going down the SSD route.

16th of May

Farm status
CPU only
Running Rosetta overnight

Nvidia GPUs
Running Einstein (GPU) and Rosetta (CPU) overnight

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

For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster


Other news
The weather turned cooler so I have had the GPU's running in the mornings and all the CPUs going overnight.

I'm still keeping an eye out for more up to date GPU's. There seem to be RTX 3060's available from one retailer, however the pricing on them is more than the RTX 3060 Ti. The Ti has more compute units and is what I am trying to get. Maybe with the mining rate limiter on all new Nvidia GPUs availability will improve. What is not known is if it will limit non-mining compute work.


Project news - Milkyway@home
The university network appears to have been hacked and has been locked down while they investigate. The project has been unavailable since the 8th of May. Here is their Twitter post from the 9th of May:

"Information advisory: Rensselaer is investigating a trespass into our university network. We have temporarily suspended access to the network, as we work with law-enforcement and cybersecurity experts to determine the extent of the trespass."


Ampere Altra
I managed to get Debian Bullseye installed. The Debian Buster (current release) installer would lock up after prompting for the language. Debian announced a release candidate version of the installer for Bullseye (their next release) so I tried it. Debian isn't an officially supported operating system so I wasn't surprised that I had issues getting Buster installed.

I still haven't worked out how to reduce the fan noise. The fans spin up to full speed when the machine does its POST, it then reduces the speed a little once it boots. I still need to use hearing protection if I am in the same room.

I have installed BOINC on it and registered the machine at Einstein and Rosetta. I haven't tried any crunching on it yet as Rosetta needs 8 hours and I can't run it for that long. I will try Einstein tasks which typically take 3+ hours on the Raspberry Pis. The Altra is clocked at twice the speed of a Pi4 so might be able to get them done in 90 minutes.

25th of April

Farm status
CPU only
Running Rosetta work

Nvidia GPUs
Running Rosetta (CPU) overnight and Einstein (GPU) in the mornings

Raspberry Pis
Running Rosetta and Einstein 24/7

For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster


Other news
I installed one of the WD SN850 SSD's into the Ampere Altra. I've got it on the shelving unit where most of the Intel machines were sitting. I've powered it up. Its very loud for a 2U machine. While I managed to get it to boot off a USB thumb drive it wouldn't install Debian Buster. I've downloaded the Debian Bullseye image and will try that next. I have also downloaded an Ubuntu server image that I can try. Due to the noise I can't run it when other people are around.

The other two WD SN850's were installed into the Ryzen 5900X machines (one each) and I did a clean install of the operating system and BOINC on them.


Graphics cards
I am keeping an eye on my usual computer hardware shops to try and get RTX 3060 Ti cards. I've been looking for months now. One shop has RTX 3060 (non-Ti) but they want more money for them than the Ti version. They won't take orders unless they have stock and they never seem to have stock on the Ti versions.

Hopefully with Etherium changing to Proof of Stake soon and Nvidia throttling Etherium mining on their cards that should mean the crypominers lose interest, or they will switch to some other flavor of bitcoin. I won't buy off eBay or similar sites as you don't get a warranty and I don't want to support scalping.

10th of April

Farm status
CPU only
Running Rosetta overnight

Nvidia GPUs
Two running Einstein (GPU) and Rosetta overnight (CPU)

Raspberry Pis
Running Einstein and Rosetta

For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster


Bye Bye Intel
The Intel GPU machines have been sold. They were 6 x Intel Core i7-8700 with 32GB of memory. That leaves room on the wire shelving units for the ARM server and moving the 2nd storage server.

I spent the day removing network and power cables from behind and beneath the shelving units. I removed a 16 port switch from the network and the cabling for the Pis has been consolidated to another 16 port switch. I used a lot of zip ties to bundle the network cabling together once the redundant ones had been extricated.

I now need to get another 10GbE switch so I can run the ARM and 2nd storage servers. They both have 10GbE NICs and while I have a couple of free ports on the current switch its on the other side of the room, so I have to run cables and there will be few devices on that shelving unit all wanting 10GbE connectivity.