25th of April

Farm status
CPU only
Running Rosetta work

Nvidia GPUs
Running Rosetta (CPU) overnight and Einstein (GPU) in the mornings

Raspberry Pis
Running Rosetta and Einstein 24/7

For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster


Other news
I installed one of the WD SN850 SSD's into the Ampere Altra. I've got it on the shelving unit where most of the Intel machines were sitting. I've powered it up. Its very loud for a 2U machine. While I managed to get it to boot off a USB thumb drive it wouldn't install Debian Buster. I've downloaded the Debian Bullseye image and will try that next. I have also downloaded an Ubuntu server image that I can try. Due to the noise I can't run it when other people are around.

The other two WD SN850's were installed into the Ryzen 5900X machines (one each) and I did a clean install of the operating system and BOINC on them.


Graphics cards
I am keeping an eye on my usual computer hardware shops to try and get RTX 3060 Ti cards. I've been looking for months now. One shop has RTX 3060 (non-Ti) but they want more money for them than the Ti version. They won't take orders unless they have stock and they never seem to have stock on the Ti versions.

Hopefully with Etherium changing to Proof of Stake soon and Nvidia throttling Etherium mining on their cards that should mean the crypominers lose interest, or they will switch to some other flavor of bitcoin. I won't buy off eBay or similar sites as you don't get a warranty and I don't want to support scalping.

10th of April

Farm status
CPU only
Running Rosetta overnight

Nvidia GPUs
Two running Einstein (GPU) and Rosetta overnight (CPU)

Raspberry Pis
Running Einstein and Rosetta

For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster


Bye Bye Intel
The Intel GPU machines have been sold. They were 6 x Intel Core i7-8700 with 32GB of memory. That leaves room on the wire shelving units for the ARM server and moving the 2nd storage server.

I spent the day removing network and power cables from behind and beneath the shelving units. I removed a 16 port switch from the network and the cabling for the Pis has been consolidated to another 16 port switch. I used a lot of zip ties to bundle the network cabling together once the redundant ones had been extricated.

I now need to get another 10GbE switch so I can run the ARM and 2nd storage servers. They both have 10GbE NICs and while I have a couple of free ports on the current switch its on the other side of the room, so I have to run cables and there will be few devices on that shelving unit all wanting 10GbE connectivity.