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.