2nd of February

So after a warm week yesterday cooled off and we had a howling wind. Great for the farm though. I fired up the non-GPU cluster of machines and the GPUgrid crunchers.

Seeing as the GPUgrid crunchers have been off for a while they immediately went into high priority mode thinking that they wouldn't be able to complete the work in time. Now they are 75% through they have decided they don't need high priority. Hopefully I can get a few work units out before the weather warms up again.


BOINC news
We got up to 7.0.47 this week. Nothing major in this, mostly cosmetic changes and some tweaks to messages, etc. I have it installed on two machines, one non-GPU and one with a GPU. Actually the term non-GPU is not correct, they all have Intel GPU's integrated on the CPU chip.


Pi news
The 1st Raspberry Pi that I got is still having issues so I have put in a request to replace it with the supplier (Element 14) in Sydney. In the mean time I have ordered two more Raspberry Pies. I have some vague idea that I would like to make a small cluster of them and use Beowulf or HTCondor if I can find a version that will run on them. I know I can run BOINC on each one of them but what would be nice if I could get BOINC to submit work requests to the cluster.

I have also been looking around for cases and power supplies. There doesn't seem to be anything out there for multiple Pi machines.

While searching I did come across one setup where they are emulating a MicroVAX 3900 on the Raspberry Pi and its running OpenVMS. They had two of them clustered together. The link is:
http://www.designspark.com/blog/a-raspberry-pi-vax-cluster

My one working Pi is currently trying out Albert@home work. This is the beta test project for Einstein@home. They are testing smaller size work units just for the Pi and an optimised science application. Its currently about 75% through its first work unit and looks like its going to be about 3 days per work unit. This is on a "medium" overclock as set by Raspi-config.