GPUgrid 1 million

After a bit of manual intervention I hit 1 million credits for GPUgrid today. Below is my certificate.

This week had Einstein off the air pretty much for the whole week. Apparently their database server crashed and they had to build another machine to become a DB server. Their database was so huge that it wouldn't stay up so they had to purge large numbers of old work units to get it to a size that would work. As of today they are back on the air but may run out of work during the weekend.

As a result of Einstein being off the air the CPU's ran dry a couple of times, but the GPU's had plenty of work thanks to GPUgrid. I rejoined CPDN (climateprediction.net) and have 4 tasks running on one machine. They will be going all week.

Highlights of this week

• Additional pair of GTS250's installed
• nVidia drivers update to 182.50
• GPUgrid nearing 1 million credits
• Seti@home 10 year anniversary
• Further BOINC testing

The other pair of GTS250 cards arrived on Wednesday so I installed one into Anakin as it didn't have one. On Thursday night I swapped out the 9800GT from Qui-Gon with the other GTS250. Thats 4 of the quaddies upgraded now with a single GTS250 card in each one. Yoda is the one remaining quad-core machine to do.

While I was updating graphics cards I had to reinstall (in the 2 machines that had the 9800GT's) the drivers. I put the 182.50 driver on all the machines with the GTS250 cards. I am yet to update the drivers in Maul.

With all the new graphics cards my GPUgrid score is rising and not too far off the 1 million credits milestone.

Seti@home is coming up on its 10 year anniversary and they are having an open day. Not that I have been crunching Seti for that long. I did reach 10,000 "classic" work units on the 8th of July 2005. This was before they started using the BOINC platform. As I am nowhere near Berkeley, California it would be rather hard for me to attend. I will have to settle for an anniversary T shirt.

The BOINC software is having a few issues with swapping tasks out when it shouldn't be, so there is much discussion going on about the best approach to use when scheduling cuda tasks in particular. I will be testing it again.

GTS250 GPU-Z screenshot

Here is a GPU-Z screen shot of one of the new GTS250's.

Highlights of this week

• Two GTS250 cards arrived and installed
• Ordered another pair of GTS250 cards
• BOINC 6.6.23 being beta-tested. Seems to be a bit better for GPU work
• Downloaded (but yet to try) nVidia drivers 182.50

As mentioned above BOINC 6.6.23 was released. It has a couple of improvements for GPU handling. It seems to be more reliable with GPU work. It still has (from earlier 6.6 versions) issues with suspending tasks for no reason and running others, but still its an improvement.

GTS250 - part 1

The two GTS250 cards arrived this week, so I installed them. I like them so much I have ordered another pair. Speed-wise they seem to be about 20-25% faster than the 9800GT while using the same wattage. Price-wise they cost about $20 more than the 9800GT.

On Wednesday I swapped the 9800GT card for a GTS250 in Luke. I did this one first as it has already had its power supply upgraded. After a reinstall of the drivers its off and running.

On Friday I replaced the power supply in Obi-Wan. I then put the other GTS250 in there. As with Luke I had some fiddling with the black plastic clip that holds the metal plates on the back plane. I ended up filing it back for the GTS250. After installing the drivers its off and running.




You can see the heat pipes from the heatsink in this shot and the fan. Its hard to tell from the photos (the plastic shroud gets in the way) but there is a heatsink between the circuit board and the fan. It is slightly wider than the heat pipes.

GTS250 - part 2

Here is one of the GTS250 cards installed in Obi-Wan. You can see the black plastic retaining clip on the left.




Here is another shot looking down the length of the card.




And in keeping with the tradition of having the appropiate figurine, here is Obi-Wan standing on himself.

Easter long weekend

Nothing much to report this week. I went away for an extra long easter long weekend. Late last week I ran down the cache on all the machines except one (Maul) and powered them off. Now that i'm back I have 3 going and will power up the others later.

Late last week I ordered a couple of GTS250 graphics cards for two of the quaddies that have yet to be upgraded. I already have 500 watt power supplies, but have been holding off the purchase of graphics cards pending nVidia releases. They should be available later this week.

In my absence it appears Einstein and GPUgrid have both gone off the air. Einstein's database ran out of memory. GPUgrid had a power failure, but appear to be back on-line as I write this.

BOINC 6.6.20 became the latest release version, so i'm up to date on all the machines. However there have already been a couple of development versions released since then. I will see if it warrants further beta-testing.

5 million credits

A pleasant suprise. I hit 5 million credits today. Only 1 day after posting the last blog entry (at that time I was on 4.977M). The BOINCstats image is below.

GPUgrid 500k

I reached 530k for GPUgrid today. Below is their certificate. The new GTX260's cards seem to be ripping through the work (about 6 hours per GPUgrid work unit).




I have one machine sitting around idle as I haven't got power, screen or a mouse to have it working. Not to mention the amount of heat these things generate. It alternates between Yoda and Obi-Wan at the moment, taking turns to sit on the floor unplugged.

Still waiting for nVidia to release the GTX212. Hopefully that will be more suitable for all the quad-core machines. I still have two 500w power supplies sitting in their boxes waiting to be installed for GPU upgrades.

Highlights of this week

• GPUgrid passed the 500k milestone
• BOINC 6.6.20 is out, so will be upgrading the machines to that
• First lot of CPDN work finally finished (they take a week)
• The farm is getting close to 5 million for all projects