7th of October

Farm status
Intel GPUs
All off

Nvidia GPUs
Running Einstein gravity wave work overnight

Raspberry Pis
All except two running Einstein BRP4 work

For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster


Other news
Weather warm during the day so crunching overnight.


Storage servers
I spent the weekend working on the tower case storage server. The case has room for 10 drives however the top two drive bays are intended for a CD burner. The other 8 drive bays are designed for 3.5" drives. I currently have 4 x 4TB WD SE drives in there. Originally this machine used to run Windows Server 2008 with a RAID controller. I swapped it over to Linux last year.

This week I removed the RAID controller card and plugged the drives into the motherboard SATA controller to simplify things. I updated the OS to the latest Debian and reinstalled ZFS onto it. I went to restore from the Drobo which decided one its drives was missing. A quick power off and reseat the 3 drives got it going in a degraded state. I copied the files back from the Drobo while it was repairing itself. That has the tower case storage server up and running.

For the rack mount (disk based) storage server I ordered more memory. It currently has the 32GB that was in the tower case storage server and I want it back. The rack mount will get 8 x 16GB of ECC memory bringing it up to 128GB.

I looked at adding a cache drive to the storage servers but the recommendations for ZFS seems to be increase the memory to its maximum first. Only add an SSD as a cache drive once you get above 64GB of memory as the L2ARC (cache drive) uses main memory.