7th of December

Back in Sydney.

Adventure
Well its home with me. I haven't taken it out of the box. I have ordered a 2nd set of bridge cards/cable for it from the company in Japan.

I have asked my computer shop to see if they can find a suitable case for it (they need 12 cut-outs on the back plane for all the cards). I have a spare Corsair 1000 watt power supply which probably isn't enough for all the cards, but might be enough to get it going with say half the cards. The shop hasn't got back to me yet.

I need to decide which machine is going to host it. I have a number of Q6600's but they only have a single PCIe x16 slot. The P6T's have 3 slots (two are x16) but I would rather not use them as a host. I may need to get another machine with dual x16 slots. It wouldn't need to do much processing, it just needs to feed the PCIe bus.

The 10 GTS450 cards have been ordered. The latest email from the company in Japan is they shipped them today.


BOINC testing
Well the 6.13 line has ended and 7.0.2 is out for testing. There have been a few different issues reported for it already, so I will wait for another build before I install it on one machine (probably Maul).


Farm news
Sulu has just completed its Hi-res Ocean CPDN work unit that it had before I went away. Its also finished off the 3 regional models that it had. Since then its picked up another 3 Hi-res Ocean work units. Its also running Einstein CPU work.

I have a couple of machines running GPUgrid work so they should be getting a fair bit processed now as they try and catch up.

My 22 inch monitor has been playing up for the past 6 months. It switches the screen off after about 20 minutes of use. I think its got a dry joint and once it warms up it turns off. Some times it will do this while you are in the middle of using the machine, so its not power management. To fix this I normally just turn it off and on. The power switch on it broke yesterday. It would appear to not push out, so probably broke a spring. Now its on until it warms up, then all I can do is pull the power cable out and put it back. Time to order a new one I think.


GTS450 cards
I have installed the 3 of them in Maul, swapping out the GT240 cards that were there before. They run rather hot, not suprisingly being single slot cards. What is suprising is that they only appear to be a little faster. The peak flops reported by BOINC is approximately 1/3 more (401). For Einstein work the GT240's were taking around 80 minutes and the GTS450 around 60-70 minutes. It could also be a driver issue as I had to install later drivers.

If they overheat they make the machine reboot. I have added an extra fan near the cards to blow air down the length of the cards but it doesn't seem to make much difference. The top most card is 10 degrees hotter than the bottom card. The BIOS isn't agressive enough at increasing fan speed so I have had to do this manually to stop them overheating.