30th of October

Milestones
I reached 5 million for Einstein. Below is my certificate



Nvidia drivers
They released 260.89 last week and 260.99 this week. Both as WHQL. Unfortunately they down-clock on non-Fermi cards after 30 mins. As a result i've gone back to the 258.69 drivers for all my non-Fermi rigs (which is pretty much all of them).


Project news - GPUgrid
They are up and running with a bunch of longer running work units. They take around 10 hours each. Given the short deadlines (5 days) the lower-end graphics cards have problems completing these in the timeframe.

They are planning on introducing a cuda 3.2 based app, when Nvidia release the developer toolkit (its under a NDA at the moment). They will drop the cuda 3.0 and 3.1 apps. They will contine with a cuda 2.3 based app as well for those running older cards/drivers.


Project news - Seti
Well they are up in a very limited capacity now. No new work, but people can upload completed work and report it.

They've ordered 2 HP servers to replace the couple of faulty database machines. Expected delivery is 2 weeks, and then another 2 weeks to migrate stuff onto them.


Maul
Last week there was an annoying clicking sound coming from Maul about every 6 seconds. A couple of days later I got an error reading one of the data files. So putting 2 and 2 together I decided the hard disk drive might be at fault. I run some disk diagnostics and it doesn't find anything wrong. I decided to order a replacement HDD as I don't have any spare SATA drives. The one in it is from a few years back, in fact its the only original bit of hardware left in it now.

The next day i'm standing at the KVM and look over at Maul and notice the fan on the front isn't turning and the click sound comes each time as it tries to turn. I power it off and remove a power cable that was poking into the 20cm fan and preventing it from turning. Power up and off we go without the clicking sound.

I now have a few spare drives (500Gb WD Caviar Blue). I'll probably remove the old one and install the new one in about a week. I don't want to change the hardware too much in one go so that Windows activation doesn't think its got a new machine.