3rd of March

This weekend was windy and wet. Ideal weather for the crunchers really. I managed to fire up the GPUgrid crunchers for a few days as well as having the Intel-GPU machines going.

 

GPUgrid have some rather long work units in their long queue that have been keeping my GTX670's busy. The uploads haven't reduced in size yet, apparently they need to turn on a parameter on the server side the next time they create work units before it will take effect.

 

After a bit more experimenting with BoincTasks and the Raspberry Pi I have revised the instructions a bit. It seems you don't need to provide a password (well at least with BOINC 7.0.27 which is the version in the repo).

 

My faulty Pi was returned to element 14 who have issued a credit. Now all I need to do is buy another one.

 

 

Parallella

Remember them, they have been making progress on their boards. They are similar to the Raspberry Pi except they contain a dual-core ARM processor and the Epiphany chip. They have 16 and 64 core versions of the Epiphany chip which is OpenCL capable. They are targetting a price of $100 for the 16 core version. Last week they released their documentation and a couple of weeks ago they released the source code for their OpenCL driver. The boards themselves have been finalised and now they are getting them produced in quantity

 

 

Setting up BoincTasks talking to a Raspberry Pi

1. On the Pi you'll need to put the IP address and host name of the BT machine into /etc/hosts
2. On the Pi you'll need to put the host name of the BT machine into /var/lib/boinc-client/remote_hosts.cfg
3. Restart the Pi to pick up the above changes
4. In BT (on your PC) you need to add the Pi. Click on the Computers tab and then on the Menu Bar Computers -> Add Computer. You need to use the IP address (not the host name) of the Pi and leave the password blank.

Points to note:

• The Pi is invisible to the windows PC's on the network. The router will usually be able to see all of them but the windows machines only show other windows machines. The Pi's don't seem to have visibility of anything else on the network.
• The Pi needs to have the IP address and host name of the BT machine in the hosts file. This is not good practice as IP addresses can and do frequently change. You may want to use static IP addressing

And here we have the makings of our own (rather slow) super computer running BOINC. Each node (Raspberry Pi) can be controlled via BoincTasks.