29 August 2021

29th of August

Farm status
CPU only
Running Rosetta overnight.

Nvidia GPUs
Running Einstein in the morning and Rosetta overnight.

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

For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster

For news on my Chia Plotting see Marks Adventures in Chia


Other news
I managed to buy one EVGA RTX 3060 Ti. Hopefully it will provide a performance improvement over my GTX 1660 Ti's. Its totally overpriced but its from one of my usual computer shops so it comes with a warranty. Now all I need is another 3 to replace the rest of my 1660 Ti's. I need to upsize the power supply in the machine that its going to get the 3060 Ti. I already have four 850 watt power supplies ready to install.

I have now updated both the Ryzen 5900X machines to Debian bullseye. I also updated one of the Nvidia GPU machines without issue so far, apart from all the projects assuming its a new host and having to merge it with the previous one. The exception is CPDN which doesn't allow deleting old hosts, nor merging any with a difference (like OS version).


Update 31 Aug 2021
The RTX 3060 Ti arrived. I swapped the old power supply (550 watt) for a new 850 watt one. I swapped the old GPU out for the 3060 Ti. The old GPU will be sold to offset the cost of the new one.

22 August 2021

Running slow

Farm status
CPU only
Off

Nvidia GPUs
Idle. Have been doing some Einstein in the morning.

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

For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster


Other news
Its been quite warm so I've had the CPU only machines off. Partly due to the weather and partly due to Rosetta not having any work. Rosetta now have work.

As mentioned in my last post I have a 10GbE switch on back-order. It is supposedly arriving next week but given all the chip shortages I expect it won't. All of the compute nodes should have at least a 2.5GbE connection but now some machines are back on 1GbE. The new switch should have an SFP+ port so I may be able to use a fibre connection between the old and new 10GbE switches. While the speeds are the same SFP and SFP+ have much better latency than cat6 cabling.


OS upgrades
Debian released bullseye on the 14th of August. I've found a bug where the desktop has high CPU usage if you log into the console as root, at least on amd64 with the mate desktop. I've raised a bug report for it (#991994) although there is no acknowledgement they're looking at it. They might be swamped with issues.

I have upgraded one of the CPU only machines this morning, well it was a clean install really. This gives an updated BOINC client and Linux kernel as well as the various OS updates.

Pi-hole doesn't work properly under bullseye at the moment. You can install it if you disable the OS version checking and then the pihole-FTL service doesn't start automatically. One of their scripts is using the "service restart" command which no longer exists. I changed it to a "systemctl restart" which fixes the restart issue at least. The Raspberry Pi Foundation also haven't updated to bullseye yet. I suspect the pi-hole developers will wait until that happens before they update their code. Pi-Hole was originally written for the Raspberry Pi but is also available for other ARM and x86_64 Linux versions.

I had some issues with squid not being able to create its cache directories, but after purging it and reinstalling managed to get it to work.

07 August 2021

7th of August

Farm status
CPU only
Running Rosetta (and now Einstein) overnight

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

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


Project news
This week Asteroids temporary server died so they are off the air until they can sort out new server hardware. They think it will be a few months before they can get replacements.

Rosetta also ran out of work.

Last week Einstein also ran out of BRP4 work which is what the Raspberry Pis run. They now have work available which is good considering the other couple of projects don't. I have resorted to running Einstein CPU work on the Ryzen 5900's which isn't the most efficient project for them.


Other news
I've ordered another 10GbE switch with more ports. I have an 8 port switch but I have only got one port free on it due to all the down-stream switches. I've ordered a 16 port model and will put the 8 port over on another rack which has mostly storage servers.

My ISP had me on a trial of NBN Superfast (250/15 Mbit speeds) for free. Unfortunately that trial ended at the beginning of this month so my internet speed has dropped back to 50/15. I will have to pay some more money to get higher speed. I'm also thinking of switching to another ISP but have been waiting until I am out of contract.