Farm news
We had a few hot days and then the Australia Day log weekend cooled off a bit. I managed to get a couple of days use out of the GPUgrid crunchers. It's been fairly warm during the day, so I am crunching at night. That is except for the Raspberry Pi's.
There is a parcel waiting down at the post office I suspect it's the 5 volt fans. Looks like I might be doing some soldering on the weekend. My initial thought was to wire them up to the GPIO pins on the Pi but being worried about frying the poor thing I might just grab an old USB cable and wire it up directly to a USB connector which I can then run off a power supply, at least until I can find out how much current the fans draw. I might also want to throw a resistor or 2 in line to reduce the fan speed as 4000 RPM is probably overkill and noisy.
Asteroids project news
They are doing another server upgrade, RAID disks again I believe, so they shut down on Monday and won't be black online for at least 3 days. They also ran out of work on Sunday, probably because everybody was trying to get enough work to see them through the outage.
28 January 2014
18 January 2014
18th of January
Farm news
Not much to report, the farm has been off due to the heat, well all except the Raspberry Pi's who are still going. We're in the middle of a heat wave as it's our summer.
Speaking of the Pi's I have ordered a couple of small (60mm) 5 volt fans. The idea is to cut a hole in the top of the case and mount the fan on the top of the case. I am planning on powering them off the 5v GPIO pins.
Parallella news
They had a couple of companies inject some funds and as such are able to continue to make the boards. At last report they were up to donor number 90. At the moment they are waiting on boards and other components to become available. The next batch of boards are expected around the 28th of January (too late for Australia Day) and there will be approximately 1000, so it's still going to be a couple of months before I see mine. One of the moderators at Einstein@home has received his so there might be some apps available by the time I get mine.
Not much to report, the farm has been off due to the heat, well all except the Raspberry Pi's who are still going. We're in the middle of a heat wave as it's our summer.
Speaking of the Pi's I have ordered a couple of small (60mm) 5 volt fans. The idea is to cut a hole in the top of the case and mount the fan on the top of the case. I am planning on powering them off the 5v GPIO pins.
Parallella news
They had a couple of companies inject some funds and as such are able to continue to make the boards. At last report they were up to donor number 90. At the moment they are waiting on boards and other components to become available. The next batch of boards are expected around the 28th of January (too late for Australia Day) and there will be approximately 1000, so it's still going to be a couple of months before I see mine. One of the moderators at Einstein@home has received his so there might be some apps available by the time I get mine.
31 December 2013
End of year 2013
Seeing as its new years eve I thought I would give a final update with some statistics. As you can see from the BSrac (BOINC Stats recent average credit) column I have been concentrating on Asteroids.
For next year I'd like (weather permitting) to be able to concentrate on GPUgrid and if they ever come back Orbit followed by the others. I figure that GPUgrid can help solve medical mysteries and Orbit can help search for near earth objects that could potentially wipe out the planet.
Future plans
As always I keep an eye out for GPU upgrades if they make sense. That is they need to provide a performance gain without using more electricity than my GTX670's (which use 185 watts max).
In the low-power computing area I have a couple of Parallella's coming. Maybe, one day. There should also be more multi-core ARM based machines out next year. We will see.
For next year I'd like (weather permitting) to be able to concentrate on GPUgrid and if they ever come back Orbit followed by the others. I figure that GPUgrid can help solve medical mysteries and Orbit can help search for near earth objects that could potentially wipe out the planet.
Future plans
As always I keep an eye out for GPU upgrades if they make sense. That is they need to provide a performance gain without using more electricity than my GTX670's (which use 185 watts max).
In the low-power computing area I have a couple of Parallella's coming. Maybe, one day. There should also be more multi-core ARM based machines out next year. We will see.
29 December 2013
29th of December
Farm news
We've had a couple of cool days during the week. I'm currently on 9.6 million and trying to get to 10 million credits for Asteroids. Crunching continues on the Intel GPU's for Einstein as well.
I consider over 7 days to complete an Asteroids work unit a bit too extreme. We asked for smaller work units for slower computers but they weren't willing to have multiple size work units. There is a possibility that may change when they get a GPU app working. Until then I have reallocated all 5 of the Raspberry Pi's to Einstein.
Parallella news
We got another update that they have shipped approximately 130 units so far.
Here is a thermal image of the Parallella. As you can see the Zinq 7010 chip gets rather hot.
This is how it looks when they added a heatsink and fan to provide air flow. As you can see somewhat cooler. They have decided to provide a heatsink with each Parallella for now.
The black chip to the right is the Epiphany which wasn't in use at the time. According to reports from them it too gets rather hot and will also need a heatsink.
We've had a couple of cool days during the week. I'm currently on 9.6 million and trying to get to 10 million credits for Asteroids. Crunching continues on the Intel GPU's for Einstein as well.
I consider over 7 days to complete an Asteroids work unit a bit too extreme. We asked for smaller work units for slower computers but they weren't willing to have multiple size work units. There is a possibility that may change when they get a GPU app working. Until then I have reallocated all 5 of the Raspberry Pi's to Einstein.
Parallella news
We got another update that they have shipped approximately 130 units so far.
Here is a thermal image of the Parallella. As you can see the Zinq 7010 chip gets rather hot.
The black chip to the right is the Epiphany which wasn't in use at the time. According to reports from them it too gets rather hot and will also need a heatsink.
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