Farm status
Intel GPUs
Three i7-6700’s running Einstein gravity wave work
Two i7-8700;s running Asteroids and Seti work
Nvidia GPUs
Two running Seti work
Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP4 work
Other news
Asteroids ran out of disk space last week so I wasn’t able to upload completed work. They took the project down for a couple of days so they could copy the data across to a temporary location. There are reports they’ve run out of space again today. They have a storage server coming but when it will be available is not known.
CPDN aka Climate Prediction came back last week after being unavailable for 3 months. Their virtual machine images had all been corrupted so they were forced to restore back to March and rebuild many components. They don’t have much work available and tasks that were in progress before are no longer recognised. I don’t have any machines attached to the project as they don’t have 64 bit science apps (32 bit apps need extra non-standard libraries to run under Linux). I’d like them to build 64 bit apps as that would mean we don’t need the other libraries. OSX meanwhile is going 64 bit only so hopefully we can get some action on this front.
BOINC 7.12 released
The latest version of BOINC was released. The main changes are to support Science United which is like an account manager for BOINC. It allows computer clusters to let the public run some of their tasks. For more information see https://scienceunited.org/
The Linux build is yet to reach stretch-backports so I haven’t given it a try. There is already a 7.12.1 which hasn’t even made it into Debian.
15 July 2018
07 July 2018
7th of July
Farm status
Intel GPUs
3 running Einstein gravity wave work
2 running Asteroids and Seti work
Nvidia GPUs
All off
Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP4 work
Hardware updates
I got another of the i7-8700’s installed this week. It replaces an i7-6700. I ended up taking it to a local PC shop. They didn’t do a good job. They left the front case fan unplugged and the power wiring for the motherboard wasn’t passed through the back as its supposed to. I fixed the case fan up myself, it just needed the two rear fans to be on a Y splitter so there was a fan header free on the motherboard for the front case fan. When I feel inclined I will fix up the power wiring, meanwhile its crunching away.
The plan is to replace my eight i7-6700’s (4 cores/8 threads) with six i7-8700’s (6 cores/12 threads). That grows the core count while reducing the number of physical machines. Two have been swapped out already. The rest just need an on-site PC assembler.
Software updates
We got an updated Linux kernel in stretch-backports. It installed fine on one of the Intel GPU machines. When I went to install it on one of the Nvidia GPU machines however It wouldn’t boot. It left a blank screen and I couldn’t ssh into it. I had to boot using the older kernel. There is a Debian bug raised for it (901919). They have since resolved it by patching the Nvidia drivers, but they haven’t yet made it to stretch-backports.
Intel GPUs
3 running Einstein gravity wave work
2 running Asteroids and Seti work
Nvidia GPUs
All off
Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP4 work
Hardware updates
I got another of the i7-8700’s installed this week. It replaces an i7-6700. I ended up taking it to a local PC shop. They didn’t do a good job. They left the front case fan unplugged and the power wiring for the motherboard wasn’t passed through the back as its supposed to. I fixed the case fan up myself, it just needed the two rear fans to be on a Y splitter so there was a fan header free on the motherboard for the front case fan. When I feel inclined I will fix up the power wiring, meanwhile its crunching away.
The plan is to replace my eight i7-6700’s (4 cores/8 threads) with six i7-8700’s (6 cores/12 threads). That grows the core count while reducing the number of physical machines. Two have been swapped out already. The rest just need an on-site PC assembler.
Software updates
We got an updated Linux kernel in stretch-backports. It installed fine on one of the Intel GPU machines. When I went to install it on one of the Nvidia GPU machines however It wouldn’t boot. It left a blank screen and I couldn’t ssh into it. I had to boot using the older kernel. There is a Debian bug raised for it (901919). They have since resolved it by patching the Nvidia drivers, but they haven’t yet made it to stretch-backports.
24 June 2018
24th of June
Farm status
Intel GPUs
Four i7-6700's running Einstein gravity wave work
One i7-8700 running Seti work
Nvidia GPUs
Two running burst of GPUgrid with Seti
Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP4 work
Other news
I have 3 of the i7-6700's off while I am running a couple of the Nvidia GPU machines. The sun is out so its warm during the day. I let the Nvidia GPUs idle during the day but nights are cool so they run overnight. The remaining i7's are crunching 24/7.
Power9 CPU
I had a look at the IBM AC922. They sport dual Power9 CPUs with up to 22 cores/88 threads. They can also be fitted with 2-6 Telsa V100 GPUs (way too expensive for me). They are an ideal number cruncher. They are installed in a number of computer clusters such as Summit at the Oak Ridge National Lab and Sierra at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab.
There are a couple of other companies also selling Power9 based computers such as Raptor Computing which have a Talos II (dual CPU machine) and a Talos II lite (single CPU machine) that is more affordable at $1399 (USD) without CPU or memory.
I'd love to get one or two of the AC922's even if they don't have Tesla's in them they'd make a great cruncher. Sadly while they run Linux out of the box and there is a BOINC client for them in Debian I would have to get various science apps and recompile them for the PPC64LE architecture and optimise them. That is something I don't have the expertise to tackle.
Intel GPUs
Four i7-6700's running Einstein gravity wave work
One i7-8700 running Seti work
Nvidia GPUs
Two running burst of GPUgrid with Seti
Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP4 work
Other news
I have 3 of the i7-6700's off while I am running a couple of the Nvidia GPU machines. The sun is out so its warm during the day. I let the Nvidia GPUs idle during the day but nights are cool so they run overnight. The remaining i7's are crunching 24/7.
Power9 CPU
I had a look at the IBM AC922. They sport dual Power9 CPUs with up to 22 cores/88 threads. They can also be fitted with 2-6 Telsa V100 GPUs (way too expensive for me). They are an ideal number cruncher. They are installed in a number of computer clusters such as Summit at the Oak Ridge National Lab and Sierra at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab.
There are a couple of other companies also selling Power9 based computers such as Raptor Computing which have a Talos II (dual CPU machine) and a Talos II lite (single CPU machine) that is more affordable at $1399 (USD) without CPU or memory.
I'd love to get one or two of the AC922's even if they don't have Tesla's in them they'd make a great cruncher. Sadly while they run Linux out of the box and there is a BOINC client for them in Debian I would have to get various science apps and recompile them for the PPC64LE architecture and optimise them. That is something I don't have the expertise to tackle.
16 June 2018
16th of June
Farm status
Intel GPUs
Running Einstein gravity wave work
Nvidia GPUs
Running GPUgrid plus Seti
Raspberry Pis
Running Einstein BRP4 work
Other news
Einstein gravity wave work has been hard to get recently. They have 2.9 million work units left to complete in the current search but there doesn’t seem to be many ready to send on the project server. That means my computers go idle due to lack of work. Yesterday evening I had one of the i7’s request work for over an hour and each time it got none.
Intel still haven’t managed to get their Neo drivers into Debian. This driver replaces the Beignet package on the 8th generation or later CPUs. Its available on Github but is yet to make it into a package.
Outstanding things
I still need to sort out the i7-8700’s. I just need a PC installer to assemble them and I could then swap out the 6th generation ones. I might have to resort to taking them down to a nearby PC shop and getting them assembled.
I’m not sure how to get a 10Gbe network going. Sure I can get.a couple of switches with 10Gbe (ASUS have a fairly cheap one) but the routers I am using don’t have 10Gbe capability which means they would need to be replaced. Most of the network cabling I have is Cat6 and fairly short which is good. The 10Gbe routers however are expensive. Which one to get and how to hook it up to the ADSL are my problems. I need to find a networking guru to consult.
The other thing on my list is to see if I can get HTcondor going and run BOINC as a backfill for the cluster (just like the real clusters do). My experiments using the Raspberry Pis didn’t work out so I need a guru who also knows HTcondor.
Intel GPUs
Running Einstein gravity wave work
Nvidia GPUs
Running GPUgrid plus Seti
Raspberry Pis
Running Einstein BRP4 work
Other news
Einstein gravity wave work has been hard to get recently. They have 2.9 million work units left to complete in the current search but there doesn’t seem to be many ready to send on the project server. That means my computers go idle due to lack of work. Yesterday evening I had one of the i7’s request work for over an hour and each time it got none.
Intel still haven’t managed to get their Neo drivers into Debian. This driver replaces the Beignet package on the 8th generation or later CPUs. Its available on Github but is yet to make it into a package.
Outstanding things
I still need to sort out the i7-8700’s. I just need a PC installer to assemble them and I could then swap out the 6th generation ones. I might have to resort to taking them down to a nearby PC shop and getting them assembled.
I’m not sure how to get a 10Gbe network going. Sure I can get.a couple of switches with 10Gbe (ASUS have a fairly cheap one) but the routers I am using don’t have 10Gbe capability which means they would need to be replaced. Most of the network cabling I have is Cat6 and fairly short which is good. The 10Gbe routers however are expensive. Which one to get and how to hook it up to the ADSL are my problems. I need to find a networking guru to consult.
The other thing on my list is to see if I can get HTcondor going and run BOINC as a backfill for the cluster (just like the real clusters do). My experiments using the Raspberry Pis didn’t work out so I need a guru who also knows HTcondor.
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