20 million and counting

Despite a quiet week on the computing front I managed to hit the 20 million milestone this week. Below in a FreeDC image of my latest stats.




Maul in the shop
Given all the problems getting Maul to recognise 6Gb of memory its back at the shop. A google search turned up some forum post mentioning "bent pins". This would suggest a bent pin or two on the cpu socket. Seeing as the shop put the machine together they can sort it out. ASUS provide a 3 year warranty as do Intel, so the components are under warranty.


Seti long outage
I had some Seti work on Maul which I have been trying to get off it before sending it to the shop. Unfortunately they have had a few problems, one after the other. I managed to upload the results, however couldn't report them. Its been like that for about 4 days now. I have set the other machines to No New Work for Seti so they don't bother until the project is back to normal.


Fermi
While I was in the shop dropping off Maul I had a discussion regarding the upcoming Fermi (aka GF100) gpu chip. They have been advised by their supplier to expect some stock at the end of March. This initial chip is supposedly 20% faster than a ATI 5870. It is expected to be followed in May with another version that is 30% faster. After that they are expecting a dual-chip card to come out. All are meant to be faster than a GTX295. No indication on if they will actually have stock or how much they will cost.


Intel i7-980x
According to web reports these are due out on the 16th of March. Apparently slated for the Mac. Its a hex core with hyperthreading, so 12 cores on a chip. Its clocked at 3.3Ghz. Indicative pricing is $999 USD. Given the pricing I don't think i'll be getting one anytime soon.

More memory woes

Well I got 4 sets of memory from the shop this week, replacements for the 2nd lot of duds. I put one set into Sulu and left the memory tester running. All good, so onto Maul. Not so good. All 3 sets failed. Came up as 4Gb instead of 6Gb.

At the moment what I might do, when I can run its cache of work down, is to take the memory out of Sulu and stick it into Maul. If that works then its probably the memory. If it fails then its probably just Maul.

Update: Swapped memory out of Sulu into Maul and it still reports as 4Gb. So its something about Mary, I mean Maul. Swapped it back, put original 1Gb x 3 back into Maul and we are back at square one.


Weather
Or should that be whether to run or not? Its been hot and sticky again this week, raining in the evenings, so all the machines have been off for most of the week, with some occasional runs overnight. Not much science done this last week.


Project news: GPUgrid
New faster app released to the public. Its claimed to be up to 60% faster, but I think thats if your cpu has nothing else to do. Unfortunately mine are busy running cpu tasks as well as the gpu tasks, so its nowhere near that figure.

It also didn't resolve the FFT issues with the 65nm GTX260's (which Maul has a pair of). I didn't expect it to as its really an Nvidia issue.


Project news: Einstein
They have release a new app that takes 4 ABP work units at a time, so they take 4 times as long to run. This in turn relieves some of the stress on the server.


BOINC testing
Some changes are afoot. They are planning on doing nightly automated builds. They are also looking for some more people who'd like to do alpha testing, preferably with a fair bit of experience with BOINC. That reminds me I should install 6.10.32 on one of the machines to test it.