Boxing day 2010

Milestones
With Seti now handing out work I managed to pass 10 million. Below is my Setificate :)




Weather
Well its been hot and humid. Until tonight it was dry, but then a thunderstorm came through.

That all adds up to not much running due to the heat. Maul has been going most of the week and today I also fired up Obi-Wan who is concentrating on Seti work.

19th of December

Milestones
I hit 30 million for GPUgrid this week. My certificate is below.




Adventure 2800
I finally managed to get an answer out of LucidLogix. The price is very expensive for an expansion board with 11 PCIe slots single-spaced. All the decent graphics cards are double width so that would leave 6 slots usable. I still haven't got a price for the Adventure 2500, which has 4 PCIe slots double-spaced.

It would be more cost-effective to use a 7 slot PCIe motherboard. There are a few different brands of these available for around $400 to $500. I was thinking I might be able to stuff one of these with GT240's and it would make a great Seti cuda cruncher, however I think Nvidia has hobbled the GeForce drivers so you can only have up to 4 cards per machine, to make people buy the Tesla's


Climate Prediction
Well I finally finished off the last 3 work units. One errored out with 8 hours to go (after running for 200+ hours) and the other two managed to complete successfully.

I have downloaded a couple more Famous wu. I also got allocated 6 of the newer eu work units but they all failed to download. It was complaining about being unable to find a file.


Project news - Einstein
They are still only handing out gravity wave data. They ran out of binary pulsar data from Arecibo a couple of weeks ago.

They have managed to secure data from the Parkes observatory which is requiring a bit of development to format so they can use the same binary pulsar programs we currently use.


Project news - Seti
Maul currently has a few hundred multi-beam tasks to get through. Apparently they can't split the data from the "tapes" fast enough to keep up with demand.

They are also doing a general funding drive. They are getting additional data from the Green Bank observatory that will require some development work. There was some mention they might be able to get data from Parkes a while ago.

GTX570 update

After yesterdays run showing that you can fry eggs on these things I decided to try Evga Precision. This is the default settings, with the fan speed on Auto. As you can see the GTX570 could double as a cooking appliance.

After taking this screen shot I decided to ramp the fan speed up to 75%, which brought the temperature down. I cut the fan speed to 70% and it seems to be holding the GPU temp at 77 degrees C. The room temp is 28 degrees next to the computer

This is the factory standard model. I didn't get an overclocked GTX570 because of the heat, so I hate to think how they perform.

GTX570

The GTX570 arrived and has been installed in Spock.

It has run a GPUgrid work unit so far. The GTX570 completed a HIVPR_unbound work unit in 14,019 seconds compared to a GTX295 that did it in 27,728 seconds. The GTX295 can run two work units at a time. They used a different GPUgrid app (6.13/cuda 3.1 on the GTX570, 6.12/cuda 3.0 on the GTX295), so it may be more like comparing apples with oranges.

GPU temps got up to 85 degrees which was rather warm.

The GTX295 is still the best value for number crunching at this point, although that may change when a cuda 3.2 GPUgrid app becomes available.


GPU-Z details



GPU-Z Sensors tab with it under load



Installed in Spock



Another shot looking up

11th of December

Milestones
None this week.


GTX570 ordered
I've ordered a GTX570 to see how it performs. It should arrive next week.


Project news - Seti
They are back up and running. Maul picked up a fair bit of cuda work and is busily working its way through it. Its got enough for a couple of days.


Maul
As mentioned above its got a heap of cuda work from Seti. Its also got a heap of Einstein cpu work to get through. Fortunately its finished all the Seti cpu work, so all cores can concentrate on clearing the backlog. It doesn't help that its usually off during the day due to the heat.

5th of December

Milestones
Nothing new this week


BOINC testing
We're up to 6.12.8 this week. So far no issues. They are looking at this one being released soon.


Project news - Seti
New servers have been switched over, except for the science database one (they were copying it from the old machine just before the weekend). We got some resends of old timed-out work on Friday. I managed to get 2 work units, which were promptly done and returned.


Computing focus
Currently Einstein is the most reliable project.

Seti will come back on-line next week so I will be able to do some work on a couple of machines for it.

Climate Prediction I am trying to finish off the 3 remaining work units on 2 machines which usually get switched off during the day (due to the weather).

Orbit doesn't have any work currently.

GPUgrid have issues with their app that cause the machines to crash, so i'm not doing any work for them at the moment. Things aren't so good at the moment with their cuda 3.1 app crashing and their 10 hour work units. I might put old drivers on the 2 machines with GTX295's to see if that resolves their app issue.