Farm status
Intel GPUs
All off
Nvidia GPUs
Had all of then doing Einstein and Milkyway work
Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP4 work
For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster
Other news
I had a couple of wins this week. Firstly I managed to get Debian Buster to work on the Nvidia GPU machines and second I got some work from GPUgrid after almost a year of not processing anything from them.
While it may seem to be a repeat of my last post, after getting the
upgrade to Buster working I went and wiped the machine and re-did it.
That failed again. Then the 5.4.13 kernel got released which seems to have got it going again.
Debian Buster
There were two issues with Debian Buster.
The 4.19 kernel locks up at boot time due to needing entrophy. That was addressed by none other than Linus Torvalds in the 5.4.8 kernel. The buster-backports repo has the 5.4.13 kernel as I write this.
The other was the need to explicitly
install the nvidia-driver package to be able to display in the monitors native resolution otherwise the desktop its stuck at 1024x768. Once installed it will display properly. This didn't need to be done under Stretch.
GPUgrid work
GPUgrid have been trying different apps in order to get one that would work with modern graphics cards (ie the Turing architecture). It has taken them almost a year to sort out. They now have a large batch of work that uses the new app.
The download was huge, one of the many files is 100MB but after you have got it on the machine it doesn't need to download them again. Once running they immediately take the GPU up to 99% load and its power cap (120 watts on my GTX1660Ti cards). Run time is around 90 minutes on the GTX1660Ti. You'll need a CUDA 10.0 or a later driver to be able to run them.
Seti woes
Dispite the recent fund-raising drive to replace the hard disks in their database server they're still having issues with supplying enough work due to the database not fitting into memory. It was suggest years ago that they should shorten the deadlines but they haven't tried that yet. Generally I can't get work from them so have been concentrating on other projects.
Also in the news this week was Breakthrough Listen released 2PB of data, most of which we don't process at all. They're being handled by the Seti institute which is not related to the Seti@home project.
23 February 2020
16 February 2020
Mid February
Farm status
Intel GPUs
All off. Have been doing bursts of work
Nvidia GPUs
All off. Had 3 doing bursts of Seti and Milkyway work
Raspberry Pi
Running bursts of work as weather permits
For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster
Buster and Nvidia-driver
After updating one of the Nvidia GPU machines to Debian Buster and trying all sorts of things to get it to display properly (it would only do 1024x768 resolution) I have finally got it going.
Under Stretch (the release prior) I install nvidia-kernel-dkms, nvidia-opencl-icd and nvidia-smi and it installs the glx driver as well as the CUDA and OpenCL components. Not so under Buster. You have to install nvidia-driver in order to get the glx driver. It seems the packaging has changed with Buster for some reason.
Now that I have worked that out I can now look at upgrading the other machines. I raised a bug with Debian in September 2019.
Weather news
Or Weather or not to run. We've gone from bush fires to floods. The weather is presenting challenges hence the bursts of work when I can. Typically it will be just a few hours so I will run Seti and Milkyway as their work units are fairly short (an hour or two on the CPU and minutes on the GPU). If it looks like it will be cooler for longer I will run Einstein CPU work which takes 7 to 14 hours depending on how many I run at once.
Intel GPUs
All off. Have been doing bursts of work
Nvidia GPUs
All off. Had 3 doing bursts of Seti and Milkyway work
Raspberry Pi
Running bursts of work as weather permits
For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster
Buster and Nvidia-driver
After updating one of the Nvidia GPU machines to Debian Buster and trying all sorts of things to get it to display properly (it would only do 1024x768 resolution) I have finally got it going.
Under Stretch (the release prior) I install nvidia-kernel-dkms, nvidia-opencl-icd and nvidia-smi and it installs the glx driver as well as the CUDA and OpenCL components. Not so under Buster. You have to install nvidia-driver in order to get the glx driver. It seems the packaging has changed with Buster for some reason.
Now that I have worked that out I can now look at upgrading the other machines. I raised a bug with Debian in September 2019.
Weather news
Or Weather or not to run. We've gone from bush fires to floods. The weather is presenting challenges hence the bursts of work when I can. Typically it will be just a few hours so I will run Seti and Milkyway as their work units are fairly short (an hour or two on the CPU and minutes on the GPU). If it looks like it will be cooler for longer I will run Einstein CPU work which takes 7 to 14 hours depending on how many I run at once.
27 January 2020
27th of January
Farm status
Intel GPUs
All running Asteroids and Seti work
Nvidia GPUs
Two running Einstein gravity wave work. Two off.
Raspberry Pis
Seven running Einstein BRP4 work
For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster
Weather
Its been hot and humid and a few drops of rain. Too hot to run the farm. Today was a bit of a break in the weather so I have most of the farm running. The rest of this week is looking like it will be hot and humid so I don't expect to get much work done.
Project news - Seti
The project increased the allowed number of work units per computer. That promptly blew out the size of the database with the number of work units "out in the field". Last week they limited the result creation rate in order to get it back down in size. The project needs to fit the entire database table into memory and the machine already has the maximum amount of memory that it can hold. They resized the table last week but we still seem to have issues getting work.
In addition to database issues Seti@home did a fund raiser to replace the 120 x 2TB disk drives with 26 x 16TB disk drives (two are spares). It was supposed to run for 2 weeks but met its target in the first week.
Intel GPUs
All running Asteroids and Seti work
Nvidia GPUs
Two running Einstein gravity wave work. Two off.
Raspberry Pis
Seven running Einstein BRP4 work
For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster
Weather
Its been hot and humid and a few drops of rain. Too hot to run the farm. Today was a bit of a break in the weather so I have most of the farm running. The rest of this week is looking like it will be hot and humid so I don't expect to get much work done.
Project news - Seti
The project increased the allowed number of work units per computer. That promptly blew out the size of the database with the number of work units "out in the field". Last week they limited the result creation rate in order to get it back down in size. The project needs to fit the entire database table into memory and the machine already has the maximum amount of memory that it can hold. They resized the table last week but we still seem to have issues getting work.
In addition to database issues Seti@home did a fund raiser to replace the 120 x 2TB disk drives with 26 x 16TB disk drives (two are spares). It was supposed to run for 2 weeks but met its target in the first week.
11 January 2020
New year. New decade
Farm status
Intel GPUs
All off
Nvidia GPUs
All running Einstein gravity wave work (on CPU)
Raspberry Pis
Two running, the rest are off.
New year
As another year ticks by and we're still crunching. Recently I've been looking at an industrial unit but the prices are too high in Sydney. Maybe something further away.
The bush fires keep effecting the air quality. The air quality and temperatures effect the ability to run the computers. Fortunately I haven't been directly impacted by the fires.
Funding
I mentioned in my 24th of November post that I made an offer to fund the SuperHost idea but I had no feedback from any of the key people in the BOINC world. I still haven't had any response. I have some money that I put aside for such development work but seeing as there is no interest in SuperHost I may as well use it for another purpose. I have two other things I was interested in:
1. A monitoring tool for a farm of BOINC machines that would highlight which machines need attention. The idea is to use it in conjunction with BOINCtasks. I did run the idea past Fred Efmer (the author of BT) but he felt that BT was able to issue alerts and wasn't inclined to do further development.
2. Power9 CPU support. Now these aren't exactly your high end desktop, they are more of a server grade CPU. Raptor computing make desktop and server grade machines along with IBM and probably a few more companies. The US has a couple of clusters (Summit and Sierra) running them. Debian Buster can run on them so there is already Linux and BOINC support. That just leaves the project apps needing to be ported to the ppc64el architecture as its known.
I expect there are more people who would be interested in point 1 than there are people who run a Power9 CPU so I am more inclined towards point 1.
Intel GPUs
All off
Nvidia GPUs
All running Einstein gravity wave work (on CPU)
Raspberry Pis
Two running, the rest are off.
New year
As another year ticks by and we're still crunching. Recently I've been looking at an industrial unit but the prices are too high in Sydney. Maybe something further away.
The bush fires keep effecting the air quality. The air quality and temperatures effect the ability to run the computers. Fortunately I haven't been directly impacted by the fires.
Funding
I mentioned in my 24th of November post that I made an offer to fund the SuperHost idea but I had no feedback from any of the key people in the BOINC world. I still haven't had any response. I have some money that I put aside for such development work but seeing as there is no interest in SuperHost I may as well use it for another purpose. I have two other things I was interested in:
1. A monitoring tool for a farm of BOINC machines that would highlight which machines need attention. The idea is to use it in conjunction with BOINCtasks. I did run the idea past Fred Efmer (the author of BT) but he felt that BT was able to issue alerts and wasn't inclined to do further development.
2. Power9 CPU support. Now these aren't exactly your high end desktop, they are more of a server grade CPU. Raptor computing make desktop and server grade machines along with IBM and probably a few more companies. The US has a couple of clusters (Summit and Sierra) running them. Debian Buster can run on them so there is already Linux and BOINC support. That just leaves the project apps needing to be ported to the ppc64el architecture as its known.
I expect there are more people who would be interested in point 1 than there are people who run a Power9 CPU so I am more inclined towards point 1.
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