16th of May

Farm status
CPU only
Running Rosetta overnight

Nvidia GPUs
Running Einstein (GPU) and Rosetta (CPU) overnight

Raspberry Pis
Pi3's running Einstein. Pi4's running Einstein and Rosetta.

For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster


Other news
The weather turned cooler so I have had the GPU's running in the mornings and all the CPUs going overnight.

I'm still keeping an eye out for more up to date GPU's. There seem to be RTX 3060's available from one retailer, however the pricing on them is more than the RTX 3060 Ti. The Ti has more compute units and is what I am trying to get. Maybe with the mining rate limiter on all new Nvidia GPUs availability will improve. What is not known is if it will limit non-mining compute work.


Project news - Milkyway@home
The university network appears to have been hacked and has been locked down while they investigate. The project has been unavailable since the 8th of May. Here is their Twitter post from the 9th of May:

"Information advisory: Rensselaer is investigating a trespass into our university network. We have temporarily suspended access to the network, as we work with law-enforcement and cybersecurity experts to determine the extent of the trespass."


Ampere Altra
I managed to get Debian Bullseye installed. The Debian Buster (current release) installer would lock up after prompting for the language. Debian announced a release candidate version of the installer for Bullseye (their next release) so I tried it. Debian isn't an officially supported operating system so I wasn't surprised that I had issues getting Buster installed.

I still haven't worked out how to reduce the fan noise. The fans spin up to full speed when the machine does its POST, it then reduces the speed a little once it boots. I still need to use hearing protection if I am in the same room.

I have installed BOINC on it and registered the machine at Einstein and Rosetta. I haven't tried any crunching on it yet as Rosetta needs 8 hours and I can't run it for that long. I will try Einstein tasks which typically take 3+ hours on the Raspberry Pis. The Altra is clocked at twice the speed of a Pi4 so might be able to get them done in 90 minutes.