Milestones
Nothing again. Its been pretty warm all week, so they have been off.
BOINC versions
We had 6.12.12 this week. This one is a release candidate. So far only a few minor problems reported to do with translations into German and French. I have it on 3 machines and have yet to experience any issues with it, but I need to give it some more testing around the work-fetch area.
GTX560 released
Nvidia released the GTX560 during the week. This uses a new gpu designated GF114. It has 384 cuda cores (aka shaders). Palit have a nice looking dual-fan overclocked model called the GTX560 Ti Sonic. Its specs looks quite impressive for the $210 (AUD) price tag, so it may become the "standard" card in most of my number crunchers.
At the moment its a toss-up between an overclocked GTX560 or an overclocked GTX570, both from Palit. I'll wait and see if we can get some real-life run times from fellow crunchers before buying anything. Besides nobody has any stock.
Kirk in the shop
Well it worked last week when it came home after its upgrade. Last night when I fired it up, after having a week off, it had problems. It started off alright and when I downloaded some new work errored out the whole lot. It also locked up a couple of times and I had to use the reset switch.
This morning its back to the shop for them to look at. Of course it decided to work straight out of the box. Anyway I left it with them doing a memory test and will pick it up next week.
Server bits
The shop are supplying a case, power supply, motherboard and I am supplying the other bits. This morning I dropped off the memory kit and Windows Server 2008 to put in it. I managed to find a shop selling Windows Server 2008 fairly cheap while I was in Melbourne during the week.
I ordered some hard disks for the new server on Friday and they should arrive next week. Its getting 3 x 1Tb WD caviar black drives which will be configured as a raid 5 array.
29 January 2011
22 January 2011
22nd of January
Milestones
None this week. Its been too hot.
BOINC testing
We got 6.12.11 during the week which is meant to address work fetch issues.
Unfortunately I left Maul fetching work for a couple of hours during the week. It went beserk and downloaded too much work. As soon as I noticed I disabled work fetch and promptly put 6.12.11 on it, but now it has to try and finish off the work its been allocated. This has been compounded by the fact its usually off during the day due to the hot weather.
Kirk upgraded
I got an i7-970 cpu during the week. This morning it was off to the computer shop for a quick upgrade. This coupled with a memory upgrade as I had a couple of memory kits lying around from 9 months ago. So now he has 12 cores and 12Gb of memory. This is what it looks like with task manager.
File Server
The old one is starting to have some issues, which isn't suprising considering its 8 years old. Its a hand me down that I was given because the power supply had failed. So i'm getting the shop to build a new box for me using some spare parts that I have and the i7-920 that came out of Kirk this morning.
Project news - Seti
Their upload server died during the week. No, its not one of the 3 new ones. They had to reconfigure the latest new server as the upload server temporarily. To quote one of the Seti staff "its much too good a machine to use as an upload server". Once they get the old server sorted out (appraently the 3ware raid controller seems to have stopped working) they will swap them back.
None this week. Its been too hot.
BOINC testing
We got 6.12.11 during the week which is meant to address work fetch issues.
Unfortunately I left Maul fetching work for a couple of hours during the week. It went beserk and downloaded too much work. As soon as I noticed I disabled work fetch and promptly put 6.12.11 on it, but now it has to try and finish off the work its been allocated. This has been compounded by the fact its usually off during the day due to the hot weather.
Kirk upgraded
I got an i7-970 cpu during the week. This morning it was off to the computer shop for a quick upgrade. This coupled with a memory upgrade as I had a couple of memory kits lying around from 9 months ago. So now he has 12 cores and 12Gb of memory. This is what it looks like with task manager.
File Server
The old one is starting to have some issues, which isn't suprising considering its 8 years old. Its a hand me down that I was given because the power supply had failed. So i'm getting the shop to build a new box for me using some spare parts that I have and the i7-920 that came out of Kirk this morning.
Project news - Seti
Their upload server died during the week. No, its not one of the 3 new ones. They had to reconfigure the latest new server as the upload server temporarily. To quote one of the Seti staff "its much too good a machine to use as an upload server". Once they get the old server sorted out (appraently the 3ware raid controller seems to have stopped working) they will swap them back.
16 January 2011
16th of January
Milestones
None this last fortnight. Not much work done at all. The computers have mainly been off due to summer. Maul sometimes gets to run overnight but thats about it.
Project news - Einstein
They have sorted out performance issues with their cuda app (which turned out to be the worker thread wasn't raised in priority). Maul which is equipped with 3 x GT240 cards can process a cuda work unit around 2 hours 10 minutes.
Project news - Seti
The seti guys got another server, which was built and paid for by the GPU users group. This arrived at UC Berkeley last week and is now in operation.
Graphics cards
I have been looking at getting a Palit GTX570 Sonic. Unlike the EVGA GTX570 that I have its a factory overclocked model. More importantly it doesn't have the reference design cooler, but rather a dual fan one. Currently nobody seems to have stock of these in Australia. As usual i'd get one, see how it goes and if fine replace the GTX295's with one of these in each i7 except Maul. That is it would become the standard card for the i7's.
Speaking of graphics cards i'll be selling off a bunch of the old ones on eBay. I have a number of GTS250's, an old GTX295 (1st generation) and an ATI HD4850.
Intel core i7's
It seems Sandy Bridge has arrived, so the older generation i7's are now slowly running out. I'll be looking at updating the 920's with 950's and selling off the old cpus. As mentioned before i'd love to get an i7-970 but they are still around $950 each.
I might even update the old file server (it is an old P4 @ 1.8Ghz given to me for free as the power supply had blown) to something more modern and use one of the old cpus in it.
None this last fortnight. Not much work done at all. The computers have mainly been off due to summer. Maul sometimes gets to run overnight but thats about it.
Project news - Einstein
They have sorted out performance issues with their cuda app (which turned out to be the worker thread wasn't raised in priority). Maul which is equipped with 3 x GT240 cards can process a cuda work unit around 2 hours 10 minutes.
Project news - Seti
The seti guys got another server, which was built and paid for by the GPU users group. This arrived at UC Berkeley last week and is now in operation.
Graphics cards
I have been looking at getting a Palit GTX570 Sonic. Unlike the EVGA GTX570 that I have its a factory overclocked model. More importantly it doesn't have the reference design cooler, but rather a dual fan one. Currently nobody seems to have stock of these in Australia. As usual i'd get one, see how it goes and if fine replace the GTX295's with one of these in each i7 except Maul. That is it would become the standard card for the i7's.
Speaking of graphics cards i'll be selling off a bunch of the old ones on eBay. I have a number of GTS250's, an old GTX295 (1st generation) and an ATI HD4850.
Intel core i7's
It seems Sandy Bridge has arrived, so the older generation i7's are now slowly running out. I'll be looking at updating the 920's with 950's and selling off the old cpus. As mentioned before i'd love to get an i7-970 but they are still around $950 each.
I might even update the old file server (it is an old P4 @ 1.8Ghz given to me for free as the power supply had blown) to something more modern and use one of the old cpus in it.
01 January 2011
End of 2010
Well this is the position at the end of 2010. Unfortunately didn't get over 50 million, but will work on that for 2011. Let see if I can get to 75 million!
There has been no crunching on the farm for the last couple of days as it been so hot. Even 30+ degrees overnight, too hot to consider starting up one or two machines even. Monday is expected to have a temperature drop so maybe then I can get a few going to make up for lost time.
All the best wishes for the new year.
There has been no crunching on the farm for the last couple of days as it been so hot. Even 30+ degrees overnight, too hot to consider starting up one or two machines even. Monday is expected to have a temperature drop so maybe then I can get a few going to make up for lost time.
All the best wishes for the new year.
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