15th of February

Farm news
Its still hot so nothing much running except the Parallella's and the Raspberry Pi's.

The GTX970's arrived but I haven't even opened the parcel they came in as I have been concentrating on the Pi's When it cools down a bit I might get them running.


Raspberry Pi's
It was a bit of a surprise that the Raspberry Pi Foundation released the Pi2. Last week I ordered first 1 and then another pair of the Pi2's. I spent quite a bit of time trying to get them to work until I swapped the power supply. It seems the dual USB chargers that work fine with the B and B+ are not what the Pi2 wants. Once I worked that out it was a straight forward process to get them going.

Unlike the B+ they now have a quad-core ARM SoC (System on a Chip). On top of that they are an ARM v7 and have 1Gb of memory. They cost the same as the B+ and have the same board layout. Even Microsoft is looking at running Windows 10 on them. Currently they run the same Debian as the B+ but with an updated bootloader and kernel. There is even an Ubuntu Snappy available for them.

I have 2 up and running at the moment. I have been running the B's down and as they complete their last task retire them. I will probably keep the B+ for a bit as I am using it for some Seti app testing. Still waiting on a case for the second pair as they were out of stock at the time. I will probably get different cases as I need to add a fan. The little case offered on element14 isn't suitable to add one (the case is thin plastic and curves). Most B+ cases have holes for the Pi camera module which doesn't help either.

I have completed some Einstein work so far with the Neon apps being a bit slower than the Parallella's by about an hour but need to try a few more to get better timings. Once done there is an fftw plan that I wanted to try and see if that makes any difference and then finally I will look at overclocking them once I have a better cooling solution.

30th of January

Farm news
Weather has been hot so not much running again. The last few days were wet and cooler so I managed to get some of the farm crunching. Overnight I managed to have one of the GPUgrid crunchers processing their "long" work units (they ran out of short ones). I also ran a few CPDN work units (they take 60+ hours).

I have ordered a pair of EVGA GTX970 cards that will go into the GPUgrid crunchers. While my existing GTX670's can still do the work, the work units keep getting bigger and they are taking longer to complete. The new ones should use less power and produce less heat. I will put the old cards up on eBay once they've been swapped out.

Speaking of bigger work units GPUgrid did a special batch of "very long" work units that were expected to take 24 hours on the fastest of cards ("long" work units take 8 to 12 hours). A lot failed at the end because the project forgot to increase the maximum allowed file size. They create 185Mb result files. They have since corrected the file size limit and a number of users did a work around.


Seti App testing
Claggy has managed to get a Seti Multi-beam app compiled for the Raspberry Pi and the Parallella.

In early testing we found that the current 7.28 version would run but failed to validate. He has gone back to an earlier 7.0 version. I have done a couple of normal work units (they take around 66 hours on the Pi) and then I got a vlar (very low angle range) work unit that took 157 hours on the Pi. These at least validate.

The Parallella is faster but I had trouble transferring the program across. It seems the SD card partitions aren't set up as mountable. After posting a message on the Seti forums it seems one has to do the following:

sudo mknod -m 660 mmcblk0 b 179 0 sudo mknod -m 660 mmcblk0p1 b 179 1 sudo mknod -m 660 mmcblk0p2 b 179 2

In a directory of your choosing. Suggested places are /media or /dev. After that one can mount the SD card partitions:

cd /media

sudo mkdir boot

sudo mount mmcblk0p1 /media/boot

One of my Parallella's currently has 2 vlar tasks that have been going for the last 70 hours and think they have another 20 hours left to completion.

A big thankyou goes out to Claggy for the app, which we hope we can optimise once we've found a version that can validate.

11th of January

The weather has been hot so everything has been off for the last two weeks, except for the Parallella's and Raspberry Pi's. At the moment they are out of work due to Einstein@home having a problem with their upload server.

I took the opportunity to take the Parallella's apart and clean them. I have a 60mm fan mounted on top of the standard case so they accumulate dust. The fan blades have built up dust as well as the Parallella board and inside of the case having fine powdery dust.

Today turned cooler so I have fired up the entire Intel-GPU part of the cluster (6 machines) and the two new 6 core/12 thread machines. The Intel-GPU machines are doing Asteroids work. The 6/12 machines were running a mix of Seti and Asteroids wok.

Goodbye 2014

This is my final 2014 post. Its around 11pm on New Years eve as I type this.


Farm news
The i7-5820's have been getting a bit of a work out this last week to get an idea of their performance. They seem to be about the same as the i7-3770's. I've run Asteroids, Einstein and Seti work through so far. It is better than the i7-970's that they are replacing but not as good as I wanted. I have hoped that going from a 1st generation to a 5th generation i7 would have provided greater improvements, but it seems not.

Apart from the new machines I have also been updating the Raspberry Pi's. I managed to remove x11 from them which free's up almost 100k of memory and around 800Mb of disk (SD card) space. The latest updates include the Linux kernel and boot loader..I got concerned when it said it was going to remove packages boinc and boinc-manager, but it seems it leaves boinc-client behind. The last time I tried it you couldn't remove x11 without taking out BOINC. The upgrade takes a few hours to get installed, followed by another 30 minutes removing the x11 junk so if you are going to do it allow plenty of time.


Next year
I have a few things I would like to get done. The "to do" list:

• I would like to spend some time sorting out the Alpha Server DS15 and see if I could actually get BOINC installed on it.
• I have some ideas about getting a rack and transplanting the Intel-GPU machines into it.
• GTX970 upgrades and maybe free up two more i7-3770's to go into the rack.
• Get the Skeleton running with the PCIe expansion board

All the best for the new year.