22nd of June

Farm status
Intel GPUs
Four running Asteroids work.

Nvidia GPUs
Two running Seti work
One running Asteroids work

Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein work


Memory upgrades
It seems CPDN have finally decided its time to start offering 64 bit apps. I think this was driven in part by most Linux distributions dropping support for 32 bit and they have some new apps that want large amounts of memory. Now that they have done so I added memory to the Intel GPU machines to bring them up to 32Gb.

I had the memory for quite a while, the same brand/model as I originally put into them, but have waited until now to install it as none of the projects need large memory. Run times on tasks seem to have improved slightly as a result of the memory upgrades. I'm not sure why as the CPU's have dual channel memory controllers and they were using two memory slots. I am not complaining, I would just like to know why it made a difference.


Guinea Pig
The i3/AMD cruncher that I mentioned in my previous post has been used as a bit of guinea pig for things. It had a 1TB SSHD in there that I swapped our for a Samsung 850Pro SSD. I swapped out the HD7770 graphics card for a GTX1060 so its now an Nvidia GPU machine. I put Debian Buster on it to see how it behaves.

I am not sure if its Debian Buster or the way I have the screen hooked up, its plugged into the on-board VGA that the i3 provides rather than the ports on the back of the GTX1060. I don't have any spare DisplayPort or DVI-I adapters. It doesn't seem to display correctly. NTP doesn't work properly, they've replaced iptables and the service command is replaced by systemctl commands. Oh and they don't use Xorg any more. Debian have announced they'll be releasing Buster on the 6th of July.

I think I might hold off on upgrading all the machines to Buster until they have had their first point release, which is usually a bunch of fixes that didn't make it in time for the official release.


Asteroids wasn't working
While using the i3 I found out that my app_info for Asteroids doesn't work so I trashed a bunch of work over the last couple of days until I managed to fix it. When I checked none of the GPU machines had done any GPU work for Asteroids, they have only been doing CPU work.

The only reason why I use an app_info is because their server insists on using an app that uses the sse3 cpu instructions instead of avx instructions. The avx app is quite a bit faster. The apps are the same ones supplied by the project, but this way I can specify which one it uses.