A treat

I treated myself to a new 22" widescreen flat panel monitor. Staring at the old 15" one was getting a bit hard and I couldn't make the Boinc Manager window large enough without having to use a horizontal scroll bar.

Suprisingly the Acers didn't have the option to select 1680 x 1050 resolution and they are less than a year old. I spent a bit of time on the Intel website searching for an updated video chipset driver. Installed it on each of the 4 machines and now I have a nice crisp wide screen display.

Finally a piece of hardware that works straight out of the box - unlike my KFSN4.



This is a Boinc Manager screen showing the various tasks.

Einstein 500k

I hit 500,000 for Einstein today. Here is their certificate.

Project shares have been returned to normal now so the other projects will get some work done. Still no news from Orbit as to when they will start creating some more work.

Seti suspended

Seeing as Einstein is getting close to the 500,000 mark I have suspended Seti on all the number crunchers. This should allow Einstein to hit its target in a few days and then things can return to normal.

I got the 8 core AMD machine up and running for a short while before totally stuffing it up. Its even managed to download 34 Seti work units that it started. Hopefully I can fix it up before the work units hit their deadline. See my KFSN4 blog for details.

Seti donation challenge

The guys over at Seti are running a 5 day donation challenge, due to finish on the 22nd of August. Given recent problems they can certainly do with all the help they can get. If you'd care to participate in the project and/or make a donation please drop by.

Click on the following link... http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/

Donations

Not only do I run computers for number crunching but I also make donations to the Seti@home project, which is run by the University of California. I was quite chuffed today to receive a tax receipt from the University of California. Unfortunately I don't think the Australian government will let me claim it as a tax deduction :-)

The front of the envelope had "If undelivered return to PO Box xxx, Malmo, Sweden" printed on it. I wonder if thats where the other ones went?

I passed the 2 million credits milestone today, despite Seti still being off the air. Here is my BOINCstats image...

Problems Problems

Since Seti introduced Astropulse they have been having problems. Nobody has been able to upload results (Seti or Astropulse) since before the weekend. Also there is hardly any new work getting created so we've all run out of work. As of tonight I have managed to upload all my Seti results but still no new work available.

Fortunately I also do Einstein work so its been getting a boost until Seti sort out their woes. Orbit doesn't have any work either.

Build your own

Here is a link to the other blog that I started about the home built computer. The rumour turned out to be true.

http://kfsn4.blogspot.com/

Out of work

Yesterday all the machines ran out of work. Due to Einstein going off the air for 5 days while they did server upgrades in preperation for S5R4 and Seti couldn't produce enough work.

Today Einstein is back up and handing out work as well as Seti getting back on top of things. All the machines are back crunching and all of them seem to have scored new Astropulse work units from Seti as well (they take around 40 hours to crunch).

Orbit on the other hand seems to have gone quiet with no sign of new work for the last 3 weeks. This is probably just as well as the last lot of work units took around 12 and 1/2 days each.

Rumour has it that my dual cpu motherboard has been repaired and is on its way back (even though I wanted to go and collect it). If this is the case it may eventually get to do some processing (just when Intel starts shipping their Nehalem processor).

More shuffling

I went out and bought another shelving kit and spent the next couple of hours rearranging things. Here is the end result...