Climate milestone

I managed to get to 250,000 for Climate Prediction this week. I think thats pretty good considering they take around 60 hours per work unit. Unfortunately they don't have a certificate.


Fermi
I've asked the computer shop to see how many Fermi based cards they are likely to be getting. They think it will be something like 20, but don't have a confirmed allocation at the moment, nor do they know what sort of cards they will be (GTX480 or GTX470). Add to that they don't know pricing either. Anyway i've asked for two GTX470's, depending on the price and availability of course.


Qui-Gon returns
Seeing as Maul is still off with the distributor I fired up Qui-Gon (an Acer quad-core machine). It was working fine for a while then it decided to reboot and keep the fans running at full speed. I went into the BIOS as it shows the CPU temperature. It looked fairly normal to me. I used a can of air and blew out the heatsink just in case. After that it refused to boot. That is until tonight when I tried it, a week after dusting it out. It booted up first go and is back to crunching some Einstein work.


BOINC versions
We had 6.10.39 last week and then it jumped up to 6.10.43 with a bunch of changes in the space of a couple of days. I've got it on two machines and it seems to be working fine. It has a number of improvements to the amount to CPU time the core client spends managing tasks.


Electricity
It seems the NSW state government has decided to bail out the electricity generators. They announced a 64% price increase over 3 years. This is on top of last years price increase to fund infrastructure upgrades.