23rd of May

Farm status
CPU only
Running Rosetta work.

Intel GPUs
All running Rosetta work

Nvidia GPUs
Two running Rosetta work

Raspberry Pis
Two running Rosetta. Six running Einstein work.

For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster


Other news
The 64GB memory kits arrived. I've installed one kit in the CPU only machine and removed the 4 sticks of 16GB that it had. They've been reinstalled into the remaining Nvidia GPU machines. That brings all the 6 core/12 thread machines up to 32GB of memory. The 64GB kits have RGB lighting which I find rather annoying.

The other CPU only machine that I ordered is delayed. The motherboard seems to have been back ordered and keeps changing dates as to when it will arrive.


2.5GbE networking
The 2.5GbE network cards arrived. They only use a PCIe gen3 x1 slot but when I plugged it into an x1 slot the kernel started spamming the console with messages about PCIe bus errors. After swapping it to a free x16 slot it worked fine, so probably something to do with how the PCIe slots are wired up.

The first card went into the proxy server and the second card is in the CPU only machine. I still need to try some speed tests between them and the 10GbE machines (the storage servers).

I used to have the gigabit ports bonded so they share the network traffic but have now switched to running the 2.5 gigabit card as primary and the motherboard (gigabit) port as an active backup.

Debian don't have a driver for the Realtek 8215. Support for the chip was added in August 2019 but the Debian firmware-realtek package is from July 2019. I ended up getting the driver directly from the Linux kernel web site.

I've ordered some more of these EDUP cards off eBay. The original seller increased the price to 69 AUD but I found another seller with them listed in GBP which worked out to 60 AUD each. I only need one more for the next CPU only machine.

Running two network ports per machine now means I need more network cables. Something else to buy.

Update: 26 May 2020
I managed to get one of them to do around 2.5Gbit. According to iperf3 they were doing 2.27Gbit. That was between a 10Gbit and through a few switches into a machine with a 2.5Gbit card. I tested in both directions.