19th of May

Farm status
Intel GPUs
Running Einstein A2AS20 work overnight

Nvidia GPUs
Two running Seti work overnight

Raspberry Pis
Twelve running Einstein BRP4 work.
Four running Seti work.


Other news
The farm has been running overnight as it is still warm during the day. I had the Intel GPUs run some Asteroids work for a couple of days as they are only on 55M credits compared to Einstein on 59M and Seti on 61M. I am trying to spread the project work evenly.

I had two of the Nvidia GPU machines run some Einstein A2AS20 work, but only running 8 tasks at a time which means they took 16 hours to complete. They are first generation Ryzen's and the hyper-threading doesn't give much of a gain. They are next on my list of upgrades.

GPUgrid are looking at beta testing an updated science app. The new app is to support the Turing based GPU's such as my GTX 1660 Ti cards.

Asteroids unfortunately don't have a compatible app, their CUDA Period Search app has been compiled with CUDA 5.5 and doesn't work with the Turing based GPU's. Nvidia are currently on CUDA 10.1.


Mate on Debian
Debian have some of the newer versions of software in a repository called Stretch-backports. In there they happen to have the next release of the desktop that I use called Mate. Stretch is using 1.16.2 and Stretch-backports has 1.20, so I put it on one machine to see how it looks. The desktop didn't change much but I think BOINC Manager looks a lot worse. I have sent a couple of screen shots off to the BOINC developers mailing list suggesting we might need to "tweak" the manager.

Below you can see the same version of BOINC Manager (7.10.2) under Mate 1.16.2 and then under Mate 1.20. Which one do you think is better?

 

11th of May

Farm status
Intel GPUs
All running Einstein O2AS20 work

Nvidia GPUs
Two running Seti

Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP4 work


Other news
Debian pushed their 418.56 Nvidia driver through to stretch-backports. I now have the GTX 1660 Ti going. I upgraded the other Nvidia GPU machines to this version as well. I updated the Seti Multi-beam GPU app to the latest version (it needed CUDA 10.1 which the 418.56 provided) on all of them as well. The newer Seti app gives a bit of performance boost as well as reducing the number of validation errors.


Debian buster testing
Currently I am installing Debian Buster so I can document the no-desktop bug for Debian, It seems tied to Nvidia drivers, but I am not sure if its also tied to the GTX 1660 Ti or not. I have to install it on a machine with a GTX 1060 to see if it works. And it did, so its something to do with the newer Turing GPU's and the 418.56 driver.

Next I will swap in the GTX 1660 Ti and see if I can break Debian. I will then have to remote into the machine so I can get details for a bug report.


AMD CPUs on sale
There has been a price drop on the 2nd generation Ryzen chips. Thats due to an impending release of the 3rd generation ones. The current rumor has AMD announcing them at CES 2019 which is in June, but more importantly is some (but not all) models will be available for purchase in June with the others coming in the 3rd quarter of 2019. If the rumors are correct the lowest-end chip will still have 6 cores/12 threads and the top end is a 16 core/32 thread chip.

5th of May

Farm status
Intel GPUs
All running Einstein O2AS20 work

Nvidia GPUs
Two running Seti overnight

Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP4 work


Other news
Einstein have resumed their O2AS20 search and I have it running on my fastest machines. They're taking 12 hours 45 minutes each. They also have a 1 week deadline which means you can't mix them with other projects because of the deadline. Credits are also under, given how long they run for. I am sure the project will address some of these points, although they probably can't do much about the run time.

The GTX 1660 Ti isn't doing anything as I can't install the Nvidia drivers in Debian. See my earlier post "A journey I would rather not go on" for all the details about that. I can't even reinstall the GTX 1060 that I used before because the old driver is broken.

On a brighter note I did install the Mate desktop 1.20 which is the same version as included in Debian Buster (the next Debian release) on one machine and it worked fine.