20th of October

Again not much to report this week. The weather turned hot so the farm was off for a couple of days. This of course makes a fair dent in the amount of work that can be processed. I give priority to the machines doing GPUgrid as I figure medical advances are more important than astronomy.

Today I finished installing all the GTX660's in the various machines. One each for the 12 core machines and last week I put two into one of the new 8 core machines. I also had to move a couple of machines around to fit the KVM cabling. The 12 core machines have PS/2 keyboard and mouse but the newer machines don't so I need to use USB connectors for them.

The file server was making various noises at the beginning of the week. This turned out to be a case fan that had died and was no longer able to spin up. It was supplied with the case, a Fractal Designs one. I had a couple of old CoolerMaster fans sitting in a box so put them into it temporarily. I have ordered a few Noctua fans. When they arrive I will remove the CoolerMaster fans (they are noisy and also tend to fail after a couple of years).

I managed to find a nasty little bug with the BOINC Manager by accident early in the week. The result is it will lock up the manager and use a whole CPU core. It then needs to be terminated by Task Manager. The developers have been made aware of how to do this and have reproduced it, so they will get a fix out soon.


Project news - Seti
They have commenced their annual fund raiser. The money they raise is used to fund the project rather than specific bits of hardware, which is what the GPU Users Group concentrate on. I will be making a donation, but probably not as big as usual seeing as I gave at the office, I mean the last hard disk fund raiser. As it is I have donated a 5 figure sum since joining Seti@home in 2008.


Adapteva on KickStarter
Adapteva are seeking funding to make their 64 core processor more readily available. This is a nifty way where people can give money (from $10 up) towards their target and as many people can do so as it takes to reach their target. Their target is $750,000. As I type this they are on $405,000. It closes on the 25th of October. The link to their project on KickStarter is here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone