14th of April

Milestones

I managed to get to 53 million for GPUgrid and both Einstein and Seti are coming up on 12 million. Below are my BOINCstats numbers.

 

12 cores finally working
On a whim I decided to fire up the 12 core machine and update it. That took a few hours installing windows updates, latest drivers and then BOINC. Its been powered off for the last 6 months. It still didn't work. It passes memory tests but as soon as you try and use it for number crunching it complains of memory errors. So I powered it off and went to bed. Around midnight I had an idea so started it up and went into the BIOS and set the memory speed to 1066 and let it download a single Einstein work unit. It started running so I let it go for a couple of minutes. Still going, so that looks like its working (they usually fail straight away). I allowed it to get a full 12 work units and went back to bed. In the morning they are all done and without error.

Comparing some run times it seems its slightly slower than the other machines. This is an i7-970 so its running at 3.2Ghz and the others I was comparing with are i7-920's which run at 2.67Ghz. The only difference is the memory speed. The i7-920's are all running their memory at 1600Mhz, but this one can only run at 1066Mhz. Anyway at least its going and I may fiddle with the settings later. I might just get an unlocked i7 (980x or 990x) for it so I can run the memory at its rated speed.


BOINC testing
7.0.25 became the latest "recommended" version earlier in the week. The main differences are:

• Support virtual machines using VirtualBox
• Support for OpenCL scheduling (ATI and Nvidia)
• Support for 'distributed storage' projects (there are none at the moment)

The scheduler has been rewritten so that it will better share resources across projects if you run multiple projects.

GPU Users Group news
The 10 hot-swap hard drive fund raiser was finished off and the drives have been delivered to Seti at home. They also asked for a JBOD card so they could try and connect one of the existing servers to the JBOD. That too has been delivered.

We are waiting on news of another fund raiser, which should be targetting bandwidth improvements, but still need the approval of the project staff before this can proceed.