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.