2nd of July

Again no milestones reached this week. Crunching continues as normal.


Seti outage
Well the scheduled 3 day outage is over and we survived. There is still much angst over in the forums. This coupled with work fetch issues that have recently been intoduced by the latest incarnation of BOINC, which was being tested over at Seti beta, but suddenly got implemented on the main project. I'm sure Dr Anderson will have it sorted out in due course.


UPS
At the moment all the machines are on surge protected power boards. I've ordered a 700VA UPS to go onto the file server.


Network Reconfiguring
While I was at things today (applying windows updates on all the machines) I decided to try wiring up the network a bit differently.

All the number crunchers have 1Gbit LAN connections which then plug into a "Green" (ie low power) 1Gbit switch. After that it was going via the file server and then off to the router. Now the 1Gbit switch is plugged directly into the router. I'm hoping this will improve the comms speed.


GF104 due for release in July
Supposedly the official release date for the GF104 based Fermi cards is the 12th of July.

There are to be (initially) 2 versions. Both have 336 cuda cores. The reference design card having 768Mb RAM and a 192 bit memory interface. The other is a "nvidia partner" version having 1Gb RAM and a 256 bit memory interface. Expected power use is 150 watts for the reference design and 160 watts for the other version.

I would hope to try a "nvidia partner" version fairly soon after they are released. Rumour has it they have apparently killed off the GF100. Its being replaced by the GF104.