19th of January

Farm status
CPU only
Off

Nvidia GPUs
Three running Einstein and Milkyway (GPU) work

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 hot and humid. The loft where the machines are has been in the 28-31 degrees (C) range for the past 3 weeks. Yesterday we had a break from the heat and things cooled off a bit so I could get some of the machines going.

It was so hot one of the hard disk drives in the external disk enclosure stopped working. When I went to remove it I couldn't hold it because it was too hot. I left the enclosure off for a couple of days. Its now back on-line. It has an 80 or 90mm fan in the back of the enclosure but it doesn't seem to move much air.

I still have one GTX 1660 Ti to replace. The three GPU machines running at the moment have all been upgraded to RTX 3060 Ti and 850 watt power supplies.


Future plans
I am waiting to see how the PCIe gen5 and DDR5 transition pans out. DDR5 memory is particularly expensive and in short supply at the moment. I'll probably replace the Ryzen 5900X machines with whatever comes next from AMD. The Intel chips are too power hungry at the moment to consider, but time will tell. Intel are on a 10nm process where the next gen AMD chips are looking at 3nm so should be more power efficient.

PCIe gen5 doesn't help with the GPU's as the PCIe bus isn't a bottleneck. Switching to PCIe gen5 SSD's doesn't make much difference either, sure I/O is quicker but the compute nodes don't do that much I/O. DDR5 memory on the other hand could benefit the number crunching, particularly on the CPU-only machines.