12th of July

Farm status

CPU only

Running Rosetta work

Intel GPUs

Running Rosetta work

Nvidia GPUs

Off. Had two running Rosetta during the week

Raspberry Pis

Three running Rosetta. Ten running Einstein work.

For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster 

Other news

The farm has been running Rosetta flat out as they continue their Covid-19 research. When it rains I have to shut the window and that means the heat builds up so I need to reduce the number of machines running which is why the Nvidia GPU machines are off quite often. The weather forecast for next week has rain for the whole week, heavy at times.

With the electricians coming next week I need to clear some space around power and network points around the house so haven't had a chance to look at the Ryzen 3900X build or the storage server. I had to adjust one of the shelving racks that sits above one of the power and network points which means moving computers around. They will also need access to the roof space so that means clearing access, one of which has a pile of (empty) suitcases in the way.

I will need to power everything down so all of the machines have to finish off any work they have. With Rosetta that can take up to 16 hours.

ARM based server

One of the ideas I am looking at is an ARM based server for compute purposes now that ARM is getting more support from developers. Both Ampere Computing and Marvell have new multi-core chips. The Ampere Altra boasts 80 cores and the Marvell Thunder X3 has 96 cores/384 threads. These are aimed at the data center market at the moment although usually its a matter of time before they make a workstation version.

Its a bit early (and expensive) to get one at the moment but something to keep an eye on developments. Both of these support DDR4-3200 memory, have disk/SSD support and PCIe expansion. The number one position in the Top500 Supercomputer list as of June 2020 is the Fujitsu Fugaku which is ARM based.