6th of October

Farm News
Not a great deal to report this week.

Two of the four GTX660's have been installed in one of the P8Z77 machines. The good thing is the P8Z77 has two of the PCIe slots triple spaced, that is there is enough room to put two double-width graphics cards in there and still have a gap between them.

We had a couple of hot days this week, so the farm was powered off for two days. Its spring in Sydney so its probably going to be a long hot summer. Not good for number crunching.


GPUUG fund raising
One of the users has decided that for this weekend only he will match any donations up to a limit so the Green Bank transport fund raiser can be finished off. Well not one to miss an opportunity I made a donation and so have a number of other people. These donations have now completed this fund raiser.


Project news - Asteriods
This is a newish project that is calculating the shape of asteroids from multiple observations. Their science app is written for Linux, so I have setup a Virtual Box machine in order to run some of the work units. They were looking at using Vbox from within BOINC, but have now decided they will port their app to Windows (which represents about 60% of the user base). This is good news as BOINC running in Vbox is not as efficent as running it on the host operating system.


Project news - CPDN
Climate Prediction had one of their servers run out of disk space a fortnight ago. That then meant the upload server also filled up its disks. Its taken two weeks for the project staff to move the files around so we could get the uploads through. The climate models produce large files and with everybody uploading work its a constant battle just to clear space on the upload servers.

The new i7-3770 CPUs are much quicker, so much so that they get through a regional climate model in around 60 hours. The older i7's were taking 100+ hours. I have decided to only run CPDN on the new machines.


Project news - Seti
They have been having a lot of trouble with network bandwidth. This was made worse by all the short work units which were taking longer to download than run. They have moved onto some longer running work units so things have improved a bit. They are trying to get the v7 multi-beam app out, this will do an additional calculation thus taking longer to process and that will reduce the demand for work. Unfortunately its taking longer to get this app ready for deployment.