31st of October

Farm status
CPU only
Running some Einstein and Asteroids work

Intel GPUs
Off. Did some Rosetta work earlier in the week.

Nvidia GPUs
Off. Did some GPUgrid and Rosetta earlier in the week

Raspberry Pis
Running Einstein BRP4 work

For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster


Other news
Rosetta ran out of work. One of the nice things about their work units, when you can get them, is they run for 8 hours so it makes it easier to run work overnight.

I mentioned in my last blog post that I was looking at updating the SSD's in the CPU only machines. I have ordered a couple of 1TB Sabrent Rocket SSD's to go in them. Hopefully they will alleviate the I/O bottleneck when running Rosetta work.


Linux bugs
I updated the Intel GPU machines with the latest kernel available in buster-backports, which is 5.8. After applying the updates the machines now switch to 640x480 resolution when one logs out. It switches back to the correct resolution (1680x1050) when I log in, but its really big (and annoying) on a 22 inch monitor. The Nvidia GPU machines aren't doing this.

There is a 5.9 kernel already in the testing release, so hopefully that will fix it. The 5.10 kernel is meant to be a long-term release (that is they'll fix bugs for a couple of years) so I think they will push the 5.10 kernel through fairly soon now that development on it has completed.


Update 3rd of November
Sabrent Rocket SSD's installed in both of the Ryzen 3900X machines. They seem faster than before.

25th of October

Farm status
CPU only
Running Rosetta overnight only.

Intel GPUs
Off

Nvidia GPUs
Two running GPUgrid and Milkyway overnight

Raspberry Pis
Three running Rosetta and Einstein. Ten running Einstein.


Other news
Its been warm so the farm is running work overnight when its cool enough.

When starting up 24 Rosetta tasks that there is quite a delay before they get going. I believe this is an I/O bottleneck because if I stagger the start up there isn't any delay. I have been looking at the Sabrent Rocket 4 NVMe SSD to replace the existing gen 3 SSD's in them.

I am looking at getting Ryzen 5900X to replace the 3900X CPU's when they become available on the 5th of November. I'm not sure if I will be able to get two of them as I expect they'll be very hard to come by straight after launch. I should be able to swap out the CPU and keep everything else in the machines as is.