Farm status
Intel GPUs
All running Asteroids and Seti work
Nvidia GPUs
Two running Einstein gravity wave work. Two off.
Raspberry Pis
Seven running Einstein BRP4 work
For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster
Weather
Its been hot and humid and a few drops of rain. Too hot to run the farm. Today was a bit of a break in the weather so I have most of the farm running. The rest of this week is looking like it will be hot and humid so I don't expect to get much work done.
Project news - Seti
The project increased the allowed number of work units per computer. That promptly blew out the size of the database with the number of work units "out in the field". Last week they limited the result creation rate in order to get it back down in size. The project needs to fit the entire database table into memory and the machine already has the maximum amount of memory that it can hold. They resized the table last week but we still seem to have issues getting work.
In addition to database issues Seti@home did a fund raiser to replace the 120 x 2TB disk drives with 26 x 16TB disk drives (two are spares). It was supposed to run for 2 weeks but met its target in the first week.
27 January 2020
11 January 2020
New year. New decade
Farm status
Intel GPUs
All off
Nvidia GPUs
All running Einstein gravity wave work (on CPU)
Raspberry Pis
Two running, the rest are off.
New year
As another year ticks by and we're still crunching. Recently I've been looking at an industrial unit but the prices are too high in Sydney. Maybe something further away.
The bush fires keep effecting the air quality. The air quality and temperatures effect the ability to run the computers. Fortunately I haven't been directly impacted by the fires.
Funding
I mentioned in my 24th of November post that I made an offer to fund the SuperHost idea but I had no feedback from any of the key people in the BOINC world. I still haven't had any response. I have some money that I put aside for such development work but seeing as there is no interest in SuperHost I may as well use it for another purpose. I have two other things I was interested in:
1. A monitoring tool for a farm of BOINC machines that would highlight which machines need attention. The idea is to use it in conjunction with BOINCtasks. I did run the idea past Fred Efmer (the author of BT) but he felt that BT was able to issue alerts and wasn't inclined to do further development.
2. Power9 CPU support. Now these aren't exactly your high end desktop, they are more of a server grade CPU. Raptor computing make desktop and server grade machines along with IBM and probably a few more companies. The US has a couple of clusters (Summit and Sierra) running them. Debian Buster can run on them so there is already Linux and BOINC support. That just leaves the project apps needing to be ported to the ppc64el architecture as its known.
I expect there are more people who would be interested in point 1 than there are people who run a Power9 CPU so I am more inclined towards point 1.
Intel GPUs
All off
Nvidia GPUs
All running Einstein gravity wave work (on CPU)
Raspberry Pis
Two running, the rest are off.
New year
As another year ticks by and we're still crunching. Recently I've been looking at an industrial unit but the prices are too high in Sydney. Maybe something further away.
The bush fires keep effecting the air quality. The air quality and temperatures effect the ability to run the computers. Fortunately I haven't been directly impacted by the fires.
Funding
I mentioned in my 24th of November post that I made an offer to fund the SuperHost idea but I had no feedback from any of the key people in the BOINC world. I still haven't had any response. I have some money that I put aside for such development work but seeing as there is no interest in SuperHost I may as well use it for another purpose. I have two other things I was interested in:
1. A monitoring tool for a farm of BOINC machines that would highlight which machines need attention. The idea is to use it in conjunction with BOINCtasks. I did run the idea past Fred Efmer (the author of BT) but he felt that BT was able to issue alerts and wasn't inclined to do further development.
2. Power9 CPU support. Now these aren't exactly your high end desktop, they are more of a server grade CPU. Raptor computing make desktop and server grade machines along with IBM and probably a few more companies. The US has a couple of clusters (Summit and Sierra) running them. Debian Buster can run on them so there is already Linux and BOINC support. That just leaves the project apps needing to be ported to the ppc64el architecture as its known.
I expect there are more people who would be interested in point 1 than there are people who run a Power9 CPU so I am more inclined towards point 1.
24 November 2019
24th of November
Farm status
Intel GPUs
All running Einstein O2MD1 work
Nvidia GPUs
All running Einstein O2MD1 work
Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP4 work
For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster
Other news
The farm had a few days off during the week. Currently its cool enough to have everything running. The x64 nodes are all doing the O2MD1 search on their CPUs. I am back to running the AMD machines on half the cores as they are now down to 6 hours and 45 minutes per work unit.
Einstein SSL/TLS security
They are updating their site security and so the minimum versions of the BOINC client that will work with them are:
From the 27th of Nov 2019 - BOINC 7.4.36
From the 25th of May 2020 - BOINC 7.10
If you're still running an older BOINC client you'll have to update to a newer one.
SuperHost
The original idea is documented HERE
In order to simplify things I would drop the idea of the SuperHost doing verification and leave it as it happens today (ie the projects verify the results).
I posted to the BOINC dev mailing list that I could provide some funding for a developer to work on this. That was in response to a BOINC wish list/roadmap email. I also dropped a couple of private emails to people in the BOINC community on the subject. I didn't get any response so have to assume there is no interest.
Intel GPUs
All running Einstein O2MD1 work
Nvidia GPUs
All running Einstein O2MD1 work
Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP4 work
For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster
Other news
The farm had a few days off during the week. Currently its cool enough to have everything running. The x64 nodes are all doing the O2MD1 search on their CPUs. I am back to running the AMD machines on half the cores as they are now down to 6 hours and 45 minutes per work unit.
Einstein SSL/TLS security
They are updating their site security and so the minimum versions of the BOINC client that will work with them are:
From the 27th of Nov 2019 - BOINC 7.4.36
From the 25th of May 2020 - BOINC 7.10
If you're still running an older BOINC client you'll have to update to a newer one.
SuperHost
The original idea is documented HERE
In order to simplify things I would drop the idea of the SuperHost doing verification and leave it as it happens today (ie the projects verify the results).
I posted to the BOINC dev mailing list that I could provide some funding for a developer to work on this. That was in response to a BOINC wish list/roadmap email. I also dropped a couple of private emails to people in the BOINC community on the subject. I didn't get any response so have to assume there is no interest.
17 November 2019
17th of November
Farm status
Intel GPUs
All off
Nvidia GPUs
All running Einstein O2MD1 search
Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP4 work
For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster
Catastrophic fire danger
Last week saw a catastrophic fire danger declared so everything was switched off. There has been a smoke haze over the city for the last couple of weeks from bush fires up north. The last week saw a number of fires around Sydney's suburbs, most of which were dealt with quickly.
Despite this we had a couple of cool days so I had most of the x64 computers running the Einstein O2MD1 work on their CPU's. They take around 15-17 hours when running on all threads.
More Intel bugs
Announced this week were a couple more security bugs with the Intel CPUs. The bugs have been known for a while but were waiting on mitigations being made available before they publicly announce them. With all the mitigations being put into Intel they're now somewhat slower than the AMD CPUs.
Debian Buster point release
Debian did a 10.2 point release this weekend.
I haven't upgraded the Nvidia GPU machines from Stretch because of things not working. I'll need to try upgrading one to see if they have fixed the issues yet. My main issue was Buster puts the screen into 1024x768 resolution and can't be changed. This doesn't occur under Stretch. I raised a Debian bug in September but it doesn't appear for have made any progress.
Intel GPUs
All off
Nvidia GPUs
All running Einstein O2MD1 search
Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP4 work
For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster
Catastrophic fire danger
Last week saw a catastrophic fire danger declared so everything was switched off. There has been a smoke haze over the city for the last couple of weeks from bush fires up north. The last week saw a number of fires around Sydney's suburbs, most of which were dealt with quickly.
Despite this we had a couple of cool days so I had most of the x64 computers running the Einstein O2MD1 work on their CPU's. They take around 15-17 hours when running on all threads.
More Intel bugs
Announced this week were a couple more security bugs with the Intel CPUs. The bugs have been known for a while but were waiting on mitigations being made available before they publicly announce them. With all the mitigations being put into Intel they're now somewhat slower than the AMD CPUs.
Debian Buster point release
Debian did a 10.2 point release this weekend.
I haven't upgraded the Nvidia GPU machines from Stretch because of things not working. I'll need to try upgrading one to see if they have fixed the issues yet. My main issue was Buster puts the screen into 1024x768 resolution and can't be changed. This doesn't occur under Stretch. I raised a Debian bug in September but it doesn't appear for have made any progress.
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