27th of November

Farm status
CPU only
Off

Nvidia GPU
Two running Einstein work

Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein work

For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster


Other news
Rosetta ran out of work. I've picked up a couple of resends for failed tasks but that is all they've had for the last two weeks. The farm has been running Einstein work.

One of the computer shops I purchase from got hacked last week so I had to cancel my credit card. I've been waiting for a replacement which is super annoying due to the Black Friday sales being a great time to pick up a bargain and I can't buy anything online at the moment.


Ampere Altra
I fired up the Altra for a couple of hours this weekend. Its super noisy being a 2U server so I have to wait until I have the house to myself before using it. It ran 76 Einstein BRP4 work units in an hour. Two of the work units got a download error and I have reserved two CPU cores for the machine to use which is why it didn't do 80 of them.

I found out the front drive bays are SAS by trial and error. I tried an U2 SSD which wasn't found (but the drive bay power LED came on), then a SATA 2.5" HDD which also wasn't found (no LED's) and finally a 300GB SAS 2.5" HDD which was found and I re-partitioned and re-formatted. Given the capacity I won't be using it in there, its much too small. I will have to purchase some larger capacity drives. Seagate make a 960GB SAS SSD which sells for 750 AUD or for about the same price I can get a 2.4TB (10k RPM) HDD. It has an M2 SSD on the motherboard as the boot drive but it will wear out fairly quickly if I use it for number crunching.

I still haven't tried running Rosetta@home as I would need it to run for 8 hours at least. Einstein also has a Gamma Ray search app that the Pi4's are taking 27 hours to complete. The Altra should be able to do them in around 10-12 hours but I can't leave it running that long at home.

7th of November

Farm status
CPU only
Off

Nvidia GPUs
Off

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

For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster


Other news
As you can see above most of the farm is off as its been quite warm, although not particularly hot.

The two RTX 3060 Ti's arrived so I need to swap out the remaining GTX 1660 Ti's (and power supplies) when I can find the time.

The 10GbE switch that I ordered months ago arrived. I have swapped the older one out. The old one is going to the other side of the room. The new one has dual 40mm fans and is quite loud when it starts up but reduces speed once booted, however its still annoyingly loud when its around 23-28 degrees.


Alder lake and beyond
Intel now seem to have some faster CPU's that are beginning to compete with the AMD Ryzens. They are rather expensive as they introduce DDR5 and PCIe gen 5 technologies. I don't see any reason to upgrade just yet. DDR5 memory speeds aren't compelling yet and nobody has any PCIe 5 add-in cards or even NVMe SSD's yet. This will of course improve over time.

The i9-12900K and i7-12700K use so much power for the number of cores they provided (up to 230 watts under full load) that I still think the Ryzen's are better at the moment. I generally go for the non-K versions as they aren't as power hungry but Intel haven't announced the rest of the CPU line up.