4th of July

The farm continues to run. 4 of the 5 i7's have been running constantly for the last couple of weeks. The two GTX670's have managed to get their RAC (Recent Average Credit) up to 317,000 for GPUgrid (which is all they are running) with maybe a little higher to go before they plateau.

Unfortunately electricity prices have gone up again, with the introduction of the Carbon tax and having to fund infrastructure. The last quarterly bill came in at $650 which is mostly the computers. Just as well I upgraded to the GTX670's as they should save 78 watts per hour from the cards they replaced. Once an equivilent of the GTX560Ti is available as a Kepler-based card I will look at replacing all of them as well, if only to reduce electricity use.

BOINC testing
This week we got to 7.0.31 which has a few minor tweaks since 7.0.28, but nothing major in it. I have it on one machine and its doing fine so far. Speaking of 7.0.28 it has now become the recommended version, so if you are running an older client I would suggest you upgrade.


New project - Asteriods@home
This is a new project. It is still in start up mode. They are computing the shape of asteroids from multiple sightings. They currently only have a Linux science app. Once the bugs have been ironed out they will port this science app to Windows.


Project news - Climate Prediction
They had a 3 day outage because of network problems connecting to their DB machine. When they came back online yesterday they also had some new work for the regional models, about 1800 work units. I managed to manually get 3 of the machines to pick up work and by the time I got to the 4th machine it had all gone. They have a 1 hour backoff after a scheduler request so it took some time to get them all to make work requests.


Project news - GPUgrid
Ignassi, one of their project staff had his docterate defence yesterday. He is now known as Dr. Ignasi Buch. Unfortunately that also means he is leaving the project, so we wish him well.

Their CUDA 4.2 app is now working well with run times reduced by almost half, so what used to be 8 to 12 hour work units are taking 5 hours. I am not sure how much of this is due to using CUDA 4.2 and how much is due to the newer graphics cards, but either way its impressive.