Rpi Bramble

Farm Status
Intel GPUs
Running Einstein gravity wave work overnight

Nvidia GPUs
Running Seti work overnight

Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP4 work


Rpi Bramble
The Pi farm or bramble as the Pi users call them, consists of 11 Raspberry Pi 3B’s. One acts as a support node for the others and has a PiDrive connected. The other 10 are compute nodes. The support node runs a proxy server and as a time server.

Five of the compute nodes have had my fan modification done to them where I cut a hole in the top of the official Pi case and mount a 40mm fan. The GPIO pins provide the power for the fan. The other five sit in front of a desk fan with their top off in order to get air flow. All have copper heatsinks on the SoC. For details see “Mod my Pi Case” http://markjatboinc.blogspot.com.au/2016/04/mod-my-pi-case.html

I have two 5 port USB chargers providing power. I only use 4 ports as the charger reduces the current when all 5 ports are used at the same time. They are Astrotek USB smart charger model AT-UPS-008 or 008B. I had to buy the USB cables so I got the sort with an on/off switch from eBay. The remainder use the official Raspberry Pi foundation power brick.

Networking is provided by a Netgear 24 port switch plugged into a domestic ADSL WiFi router. I use the 100Mbit ethernet and disable WiFi and Bluetooth on the Pi’s.

RAC (recent average credit) is around 5100 for them running Einstein BRP4 work, so a bit over 500 for each compute node. I use BOINCtasks on a windows PC to monitor the farm and control the BOINC client on the compute nodes.