20th of November

Milestones
Nothing this week either.


Cuda 3.2 released
Nvidia finally released the cuda 3.2 toolkit. Its been in release candidate mode for a while. Now its available to the public.

The Seti optimisers have created a test app to try some different algorithms using the cuda 3.2 toolkit. As I have a few different types of graphics cards I ran it on all of them and reported the results. Hopefully this will lead to further optimisation of the science apps.


GPUgrid switching to cuda 3.2
The GPUgrid guys are also in the process of getting apps compiled using the cuda 3.2 toolkit. At the moment their cuda 3.1 app fails on my GTX295 rigs. I suspect this is the cuda bug where it gets confused as to which device is running the app, as it works fine on the single gpu machines. That means I can only run GPUgrid work on Spock (GTX460) and Chekov (GTX275) for the time being.


GTX570
No its not out yet. Supposedly coming in December. Its reportedly 480 cuda cores and based on the GF110 chip, which the GTX580 uses. Should be good for crunching if the price is right. I will look at getting one once the hype of a new release dies down and stock becomes readily available.


Maul HDD upgrade
I replaced the hard disk in Maul today. Not a big deal to install it, but rather the hassle of reinstalling Windows 7 the way I had it. Anyway its all done, so its got a little bit more disk space now. The old disk was a 320Gb and the new one has 500Gb, however I don't use much disk space on the crunchers.


Seti servers arrived
The 2 machines that we did the fund raisers for have arrived. They have got 1 up and running as a replica database and will see how it runs for the next couple of days. I also did a top-up donation so that they can get some additional hard disks.