10th of December

Farm status
CPU only
Off

Nvidia GPUs
Off

Raspberry Pis
Running overnight.

For more information on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster

 

File corruption bugs
Debian discovered the kernel they are pushing out in their 12.3 point release (kernel 6.1.64) has an ext4 file system corruption bug. It was fixed in the 6.1.66 kernel but Debian haven't updated to it yet.

OpenZFS also has a file corruption bug which is fixed with OpenZFS 2.1.14 (or 2.2.2 if you are running a 2.2 version). Strangely Debian have put OpenZFS 2.1.14 into the bookworm-backports repo. One would have thought they would include it in the Debian 12.3 point release that came out on the 9th of December or offered it as a security fix for bookworm.

The bad news is I have a few servers with the effected version of OpenZFS. However to get it one needs to be rewriting files on the disks too fast for the underlying device(s) which I don't do. I have applied the Debian 12.3 point release to a number of machines so I likely have the ext4 issue. I haven't seen any problems so far, so maybe it is only an issue under some combination of conditions.

Other news
I still haven't assembled the Ryzen 7900 machines. I need to get a couple of Contact Frames (sometimes called Secure Frames) for the CPU socket before I install them.

I went on a cruise for a few weeks so the farm was off during that period. Most of the farm is off due to hot weather at the moment. Yesterday hit 39 degrees C. Unfortunately this is one of the joys of an Australian summer coupled with global warming.

Hiatus

I've had the larger crunchers powered off to try and save my electricity bill. It doesn't seem to have had much effect as the last bill was almost $900 for the quarter.

This week it was cool for a few days so I got all of the x64 machines going. For the CPU only machines (a pair of Ryzen 5900X) I ran a few hours FGRP5 work. Most of the Einstein work is now GPU-based so I fired up the GPU crunchers (four Ryzen 3600 with a GTX3060Ti in each) and had them running for a day. The farm is back off as things warm up again.

The Raspberry Pis continue to crunch. For more information on them see Marks Rpi Cluster

 

13th of August

Suffering from "bill shock" as they call it. My last electricity bill was over $800 for the quarter, so I haven't had the farm running apart from the Raspberry Pi's. See Marks Rpi Cluster for details on it.

I have even taken to unplugging the 2.5G network switches to try and reduce power consumption, although I don't think they use much power, its the Ryzen 5900X and the GPU machines that consume the most. The Chia storage servers also contribute to my electricity use although I haven't plugged a meter in to see how much they actually use. The power board is under a wire rack that they are sitting on so its difficult to get to.

I received the parts for the Ryzen 7900 builds but haven't got to them yet. They are slated to replace the 5900X machines. The good news is the Ryzen 7900 uses less power than the 5900X. Also I don't need to use (or power) a discreet graphics card. Apparently the CPU features list is too long for BOINC, so we need an updated BOINC client and updated server software, which is one reason why I haven't replaced them yet.

25th of June

Farm status
CPU only
Running Einstein BRP4G work overnight.

Nvidia GPUs
Off

Raspberry Pis
Running Asteroids@home and Einstein.


New CPU only build
I've ordered parts to make a couple of CPU only machines to replace the Ryzen 5900X's. The new ones are Ryzen 7900, 64GB of DDR5-5200 memory, 2TB WD Black M.2 and an ASUS Prime B650 motherboard. I'll reuse the existing case and power supply.

The main reason for the upgrade is they have a 65 watt TDP, which should reduce my power bills a little. I was originally looking at the Ryzen 7900X but they have a 170 watt TDP which is more than the current machines. I expect it will take a week or two for parts to arrive.

I was going to get my regular online shop to build it but when I added an after market CPU cooler their website decided to charge me another $50 for assembly. I complained but they were unwilling to reduce the build price. It already had a CPU cooler so its not really an extra part to assemble. In the end I decided to assemble it myself and save the cost of a new case and power supply as well. This will be my first AM5 build.


Milkyway no longer using GPU
The Milkyway project have finished their research using the Separation GPU app and decided to stop using it. They will publish their findings in due course. They still have a multi-threaded Nbody CPU app (it uses up to 16 cores). That means they only have a CPU based app so I added Milkyway to the CPU only crunchers and removed the project from the Nvidia GPU machines.