26th of February

Farm status
CPU only
Off

Nvidia GPUs
Off

Raspberry Pis
Off


Other news
Its not quite as bad as it seems. I have been doing bursts of work between the hot weather. It has also been raining heavily for the last week. The Nvidia GPU machines have been doing Einstein and Milkyway work when they can. I even managed to fire up the Ampere Altra for a couple of hours today (doing Einstein BRP4 work). The main limitation with the Altra is the noise it makes.

Last week saw Einstein@home run out of BRP4 work so all the Pis ended up with the Gamma Ray work which takes around 27 hours a work unit on a Pi4. I haven't tried running these on the Altra as I cannot commit to have the machine running for 14 hours which is my estimate on how long they'll take. They could be quicker as the Altra has faster memory (DDR4 @ 3.2Ghz) and more memory channels than a Pi4.


Storage servers
In unrelated news I am looking for replacement motherboards/CPUs for the storage servers. The existing ones work but I am hoping for something more modern. One of them currently has an i3-8100 (4c/4t) and is limited to 64GB of memory.

The Xeon E-2578 with an ASUS P12R-E motherboard and 128GB of DDR4 @ 3.2GHz memory looked promising but there doesn't seem to be stock anywhere.

12th of February

Farm status
CPU only
Running Rosetta work

Nvidia GPUs
Two running Rosetta (CPU) work

Raspberry Pis
Pi3's idle. Pi4's running Rosetta work


Playing catch-up
As mentioned in my last post I had the Nvidia GPU machines running, when the weather permitted. There were a couple of hot days where everything was off and it got to 32 degrees C. Rain and cooler weather returned and I had them trying to get their Einstein credits to similar values.

The two oldest RTX 3060 Ti machines are on 10.9M credits each so the newer ones were running non-stop trying to catch up. The newest had got to 10.7M credits when I last checked today and the other reached 10.9M credits.


Rosetta on all cores
Well not quite all cores. Rosetta suddenly has lots of work so I have most of the machines running it at the moment. The Ryzen 5900X machines have 48 tasks (24 each) going and two of the Nvidia GPU machines have 24 tasks (12 each). They usually take 8 hours to run.

5th of February

Farm status
CPU only
Off.

Nvidia GPUs
Three idle, one running Einstein.

Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein.

For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster


Other news
I finally got time to install the 4th RTX 3060 Ti and its running now.

The weather up until last week has been hot, so much so that all the machines and even the Chia storage server were off. It got to 33 degrees C in the room where the computers are! About 3 days ago we got cooler weather that allowed me to start everything up again and even get the GPUs running. Unfortunately it looks like we're heading back into hot and humid weather in about 2 days time, so the farm will probably be off again.