18 September 2016

18th of September

Farm Status
Intel GPUs
Running Seti work overnight

Nvidia GPUs
Off

Raspberry Pis
Running Einstein BRP4 work


Rpi news
One of the users over at Einstein has optimised the BRP4 app to run in almost half the time that the project supplied app does the same work. Its for the Pi3 only.

Since the 3rd of September I have noticed tasks on all the Pi3's were taking longer. Some updates in Debian Stretch seem to have made them take 63k seconds instead of 42k seconds. I am now in the process of going back to Jessie-Lite and then putting the optimised app on them. The optimised app reduces the time by almost half depending on which of the two flavours you run. There is one using an In-place FFT that uses less memory (approx. 137Mb per task) and takes around 24k seconds. There is also an Out-of-place FFT version that uses more memory (approx. 201Mb per task) and takes around 21k seconds. As I don't run a GUI on them I can just squeeze 4 of the out-of-place into the 1Gb memory that the Pi3 has.

I tried putting the optimised app on Pi #9 and it kept locking up. Strangely enough if I upgrade to Stretch it works, but tasks take about 30k seconds. I think this Pi3 is faulty as it had some issues when I first got it. It seems okay to run the project supplied app so I will just leave it running that for the moment. I have updated #1 and #2 which seem to be working fine. The remainder of the Pi's are running down their cache so I can put the optimised app on them.


Cleaning
As the Intel GPU machines have been running pretty constantly I did a round of cleaning dust filters. I have four of the older model Fractal design ARC Midi cases where you have to remove the entire front panel to clean the dust filter. The newer ones have a clip-on filter which is much easier to remove. I found one had a dead fan. I didn't have a spare 140mm fan so I took the rear fan off and swapped it to the front and put a Noctua 120mm fan on the back. It looks like I might need to buy some spare 140mm fans as replacements.