15th of March

Farm status
Intel GPUs
One running Einstein Gravity wave work

Nvidia GPUs
Two running GPUgrid work

Raspberry Pis
Eight running Einstein BRP4 work

For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster


Project news - GPUgrid
They've got an experiment going with lots of work units. My GTX 1660 Ti's are talking about an hour and a half each. I'm only running two machines so I don't trip the circuit breaker. There is no shortage of work at the moment.


Einstein gravity wave work
I have been running the gravity wave work on CPU for a while and some of the frequencies are now using quite a bit of memory. So much so that if I try and run 12 on the Nvidia GPU machines that I can get 7 running and the others end up waiting for memory. They have 16GB of memory but some of the work units are using 2GB each.

I even got one of the Intel GPU machines running them because they have 32GB of memory, but they're a lot slower.


Storage server
I ordered some larger hard disks for one of the storage servers. It only has 32GB of memory so I swapped the memory out of the other one. I found that the X10SRi-F motherboard has a fault in DIMM socket C1 so I can't populate the memory as recommended. Supermicro stopped making the X10 motherboards so I might have to try getting a second-hand one to replace it. I will also see if its possible to get the motherboard repaired. In the mean time I have put the 32GB back in the sockets to the left of the CPU which work (the C1 socket is to the right of the CPU).

I was inspired by Linus (of Linus Tech Tips) who made a relatively cheap storage server using a Fractal Designs "Define" case and he managed to stuff 20 hard disks in it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAy9N1vX76o

I wouldn't recommend going above 16 drives as the case only had 16 drive bays. He attached drives to the top and back of the case which doesn't do much for reliability. My file server with 32GB of memory is in a Fractal Design Define R2 case, an older version and it has 8 + 2 drive bays. I think 8 drives is enough for my purposes. Its currently got a SATA SSD as the boot drive and 4 x 4TB drives.


Update 17 Mar 2020
I need to make a couple of corrections to the Storage server details above.
1. The X10SRi-F motherboards are still available.
2. The case Linus used was a Fractal Designs Define 7 XL which is larger than the Define.

I still wouldn't recommend bolting drives onto the top or back of the case though, just use the drive bays that it comes with.

Meanwhile I've ordered 4 x 14TB HDD. Today ordered 3 more. The price went up $51 between my first and second orders (6 days). Oh and they have been delayed.