Hot as

This week has seen some hot weather, up to 38 degrees in Sydney. As is normal when it gets this hot the machines get switched off during the day and turned on at night when things cool off. This week was hot for a few days so the "farm" had a few days off.

Once the machines were back on all the seti work units went into high-priority mode as they had short deadlines. I set all the projects to "No new work" and when they contacted Seti they downloaded hundreds of work units, all with short deadlines. Apparently a bug on the server side as it shouldn't have received any. The machines spent the next day and a half trying to process everything and then there were issues trying to upload results as the Seti internet connection was maxxed out. They seem to have fixed the bug for the time being because I am no longer getting work.

As mentioned in the last post there were a couple of updates during the week:

• The optimized Astropulse application was updated and is even faster than before. Run times previously were around 16 hours, now they seem to be around 12 hours. A great effort. Thanks to Jason G, Raistmer and the guys from Lunatics.
• BOINC 6.6.2 was released, so I gave it a bit of a trial run. I decided to go back to 6.5.0 on Qui-Gon after getting inundated with hundreds of work units, which as it turned out was an issue on the Seti server. There are still some issues around the work-fetch, so i'll see what the next beta release offers.
• The GPUgrid guys released an updated science application but unfortunately rather than using less CPU (to feed the GPU) it seems to use more than the previous app. Something they are working on.