24th of June

Farm news
Yoda came back from the shop "no fault found". This is what it looked like when I ran memtest86+ v4.0a on it. Its overwriting the video memory with the test pattern.

After downloading the latest version (v4.20) it behaved. I left it running for 24 hours and didn't find anything. Its back to processing, just not Einstein work at the moment until they finish off the Gravity Wave LineVeto search.

The replacement monitor arrived and has been put into service.

The WD Blue hard disks also arrived (the same day as the monitor). I will be putting a couple of them into the Intel-GPU machines that are running old hard disks.

I allowed CPDN to download some RAPIT work units, unfortunately most of the machines got 7 of them. These climate models have been running for over 200 hours so far and still haven't finished. This includes the couple of machines I wanted to replace hard disks. Note to self: Don't select CPDN RAPIT tasks in future, they take too long!


BOINC testing
We got up to 7.1.18 this weekend. It has a few work-fetch tweaks and some stuff around not reporting work if uploading. It still seems to have issues with work fetch if using app_config restrictions.

16th of June

BOINC news
We got 7.1.15 earlier in the week, it has since been superseded by 7.1.17. It contains mostly scheduling fixes. I am waiting on another build as there is a fix for one problem I reported to do with making unnecessary scheduler RPC calls.

There is also an Android version available via the Google Play Store. I don't have any Android devices so haven't seen it.


Farm news
I took Yoda back to the shop for them to work out what is happening with the memory failures. I suspect it will be the motherboard as I have never had a CPU fail, nor have I had issues with Kingston memory.

Last week I updated the Intel-GPU machines with the latest Seti optimised apps. This week I updated one of the Nvidia-GPU machines and allowed it to resume Seti processing. All working as expected.

I have 3 more WD Blue hard disks coming in to replace the various drives in the Intel-GPU cluster. They all were given recycled drives out of the old Core2quad machines I had before. I have swapped out 2 of them but the remaining ones need swapping out. Hopefully they will arrive tomorrow.

The replacement monitor should also arrive tomorrow, so I can at least log on to the Intel-GPU machines. While I can control BOINC on them I can't do any maintenance without moving the working monitor around.


Raspberry Pi news
Daniel Carrion has included the Multi-beam v6 app in his Seti build. When he updated before he included only the Multi-beam v7 app. If you need both (while they run off the v6 work units) you'll need to download it again. He has also completed a v7 work unit in 10 days. You'll need to run a minimal cache as the work units have a 14 day deadline.

Daniel's blog can be found HERE.

10th of June

Farm news
It seems Yoda has some serious memory problems. I left memtest86 running and after a few hours it starts writing over video memory. I replaced the memory with some old Corsair 1Gb kits I had and it rebooted a couple of times during memtest. That suggest the motherboard or the CPU are faulty. So it will be off to the shop later this week.

I replaced the hard disk in it but that made no difference. I already suspected it was the memory but it takes a few hours running memtest before anything strange shows up. While I was at it I found a BIOS update so applied it. Of course that didn't make any difference.

I also grabbed a copy of the optimised Seti apps and installed them on all the Intel-GPU machines. I still have a dual GTX660 machine that needs to be updated however the monitor is over on the Intel GPU machines (waiting on a replacement for the dead 17" one to be delivered). Yes I can swap it around but its not urgent.


Raspberry Pi
Daniel Carrion has updated the apps for the Raspberry Pi so you can also get a Seti v7 multi-beam app for them now. See his blog HERE to get the files. A big thank you once again to Daniel.


Parallella
They have been a bit delayed again. Their current estimate for the early access users (approx. 100) will be the end of June and for the rest of us backers (approx. 6300) will be the end of August.

For those that don't know what a Parallella is, its a small computer very similar to the Raspberry Pi in size. It has a dual core ARM processor along with an Epiphany chip which is OpenCL capable. There are currently 16 core and 64 core Epiphany chips.

If you missed out on backing the project you can still order one - head over to www.parallella.org and you can pre-register for when they become available to the public.

5th of June

Farm news
Had a couple of weird things happening with Einstein work on one Intel-GPU host. It was failing a lot of the Lineveto work units.

I thought it might be memory issues so I took it off line and had it running Memtest86 for four hours which didn't find anything. I did however discover the DVD reader in it had failed, so had to replace that. I also ran a disk check which didn't find anything wrong. After bringing it back online I found it only happens when it tries to run 8 at a time. 7 at a time work fine. So I restricted it to run only 4 at a time using an app_config file.

The 17" LCD monitor that I was using on the KVM for the Intel GPU machines decided to die as well. I have ordered a 22" one from Dell. It was 10 years old.

I had a GPUgrid cruncher which failed one (and only 1) as well but it wasn't running 8 of them. That suggests to me they may be faulty work units but other users seem able to process them.

I recycled 4 Acer Core2Quad machines before Christmas and used the DVD and hard disks in the Intel GPU machines. I have purchased a couple of replacement DVD readers. The hard disks which also came out of the Acer machines are likely to get replaced as well. I have a couple of WD Blue drives as spares which will now get swapped in. I need a few more in order to do all 4 Intel GPU machines.


BOINC testing
We're testing 7.1.x at the moment. We got 7.1.3 this week which has some scheduler improvements around excluded GPU's. I put it onto the machine throwing all the errors for Einstein and so far haven't had any issues.


Seti Multi-beam v7
The optimisers have released a new windows installer for those that don't know how to do their own app_info file. It contains all the necessary updated apps. They had a problem hosting them on the Lunatics website so please use either of the links below:

• Crunchers Anonymous site HERE (in the US)
• Mikesworld site HERE (in Germany)

I need to download them myself so I can update my machines. I prefer to edit my own app_info file as the one created by the installer tends to have a lot of unneeded entries (so you don't lose any existing work if you have it).