New years day 2012

Happy new year.

I was going to pen the last blog for 2011 yesterday but getting ready to see in the new year took precendence. So where did we end the year?


BOINC testing
we're up to 7.0.6 for Windows and 7.0.7 for Linux. Hardly anything changed from 7.0.3 which I had installed before. Its still got the button auto-resize issue and its unable to build up a cache of GPU work (but it does for CPU). Its still not ready for release in my considered opinion.

I tried a couple of the Virtual Box test work units. The initial download when you attach to the test project is 1.6Gb. They work fine, but there is no screen saver or output from the work units to see what its doing.


Farm news
I put the old 55Gb SSD into Maul seeing as its usually my guinea-pig when it comes to testing stuff. I had to reinstall windows onto it and off it goes. No problems, just a couple of hours spent setting it up the way it was before. I also pulled out the 3 GTS450's and put a GTX560Ti in there.

As mentioned last week Maul was getting rather clogged up with dust (caked on all the fans and the heat sink). So it was off to the shop for a clean and tidy up some of the cabling to give better airflow. Its now looking a lot cleaner. I have asked the shop to get a modular 750w power supply in for me and will look at putting the other GTX560Ti into it. There aren't enough PCIe power connectors at the moment.

The power LED in Maul seems to have died (its gone very faint). I did ask the shop to check it but given they are imbedded in a panel they can't do much about it. This is my 2nd or 3rd CM Storm Sniper case to do this, so its an issue with Cooler Master using cheaper components. Seeing as its such a major hassle to return the case (yes its still under warranty) and be without the machine for 2 months I am not going to bother getting it fixed.

The 3 full-res ocean wu from CPDN that I mentioned last week were finished off and we've picked up another 3. Its about 25% through the current ones.


GPU Users Group
I made yet another donation towards their 45 hard disk fund raiser. The last time I looked they still needed $1630 to complete it. They already have half of the drives ordered so the JBOD we purchased is partially usable. We need to get this completed before we can move on to the next item, which is a new download server for Seti to replace their two existing ones.