Out of memory

Memory
I bought 4 sets of RAM upgrades. However when I tried them all four reported 4Gb instead of 6Gb when installed in Maul. Thinking this was a little suspicious I installed one set in Sulu, which found 6Gb, however when I ran a memory tester on it, I started getting errors. So back to the shop they went.

I have suggested I will start charging them if I get another faulty batch. No news yet from them regarding replacements. If there is no output from a memory test with the next lot i'm not even taking them out of the shop.


Graphics cards
Maul has a couple of old GTX260's (the 65nm variety). Unfortunately these don't work with the GPUgrid science app due to bugs with Nvidia's FFT cuda routines. They are also over a year old and starting to get clogged with dust. If I can't clean them out, which requires some disassembly, i'll need to replace them. My options at the moment are:

• Replace them with newer GTX260's (55nm). Approx AUD $300 each
• Replace them with a GTX295 (if I can get a single PCB card). Approx AUD $600

I was hoping Nvidia would have the GT300 (aka Fermi) cards available by now, but they still seem to be having issues. Rumours suggest that they get too hot so they have had to reduce the number of shaders. Don't expect to see these coming off the production line any time soon.


BOINC versions
6.10.29 was released with a number of modifications, most notably to the work-fetch side of things. I've installed it on 3 machines, which would appear to be working fine so far.


Plans for 2010
As far as future (potential) upgrades this year go its currently looking like:

1. Upgrade Intel i7-920 CPU's to Intel i7-980x (aka the i9)
2. Upgrade graphics cards to GT300 based ones, if Nvidia gets its act together


Progress this fortnight
Not a great deal. The machines have mostly been off during the day and only a couple running overnight due to the heat. I have been running a number of climateprediction work units which take 60 hours each. This is in addition to my usual mix of Einstein, GPUgrid and Seti work.


Einstein news
I still haven't managed to get Einstein to the 3 million credit milestone yet. Its currently on 2.98 million. Hopefully by next week i'll be able to get it to this milestone.

They have released a new ABP science app that uses a lot more single-precision maths, thus making it a lot faster and run times have reduced quite dramatically.