31st of July

Farm status
CPU only
Off. I had the Altra running Einstein BRP4 work earlier today.

Nvidia GPUs
Three running Einstein FGRP5 work.

Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP4 work.

For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster


Other news
As you would gather from my other blog the Rpi's have moved into an EC12 which had me occupied doing the assembly and some reconfiguration of support nodes.

The Altra had a bit of a run so it did a bunch of Einstein BRP4 work units. The x64 machines didn't get to run as Rosetta doesn't appear to have any work available unless I want to run Virtual Box work units.

There is talk of the newer Nvidia cards using up to 800 watts, so I will probably be skipping them. You would think Nvidia would be reducing power consumption as they switch to smaller manufacturing nodes, but they appear to be getting worse.

9th of July

Farm status
CPU only
Off. Altra has been running today.

Nvidia GPUs
All running Einstein and Milkyway work.

Raspberry Pis
Pi4's running Einstein BRP4 work.


Other news
I had the Altra running for a few hours today. Its been chipping away at the Einstein BRP4 work. I hope to have it going again tomorrow.

I am waiting on more information of AMD 7000 series CPU's. I expect to upgrade the Ryzen 5900X machines to 7900X machines, but it looks like that will mean new CPU, Motherboard and Memory. Rumour has it they'll be announced in September.

Debian have just done a 11.4 point release, so a few updates to apply to the farm. Most of it seems to be the Nvidia drivers along with a kernel update.

26th of June

Farm status
CPU only
Off

Nvidia GPUs
Had two running Einstein FGRP5 work overnight

Raspberry Pis
Pi4's running Einstein BRP4 work. Pi3's running Einstein BRP4 over the weekend


Other news
I had the Altra going for a couple of hours so it did 156 work units in that time. It is rather noisy so I don't run it for long periods.

No work from Rosetta@home (unless I want to run their Python Project - Which I don't) so the Ryzen 5900X machines stayed off.

12th of June

Farm status
CPU only
Off

Nvidia GPUs
Running Einstein FGRP5 work overnight

Raspberry Pis
Running Einstein BRP4 work

For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster


Switch upgrade
I got a couple of new 2.5GbE switches. They are Dlink X106XT switches. They have a single 10GbE port and 5 x 2.5GbE ports. They are an un-managed switch but one can prioritize a particular 2.5G port via a switch on the back. It has an annoying LED strip on the front. Unfortunately one can't turn it off but can have it display a white colour instead of the RGB. The 10GbE port is intended to be used as an uplink port so you can integrate them within a 10G network and get the best performance.

I had a QNAP 5 port 2.5GbE switch but the Dlink should be able to push the network speed a bit more. I've removed the QNAP switch. My compute nodes all have 2.5GbE network cards installed.


Other news
I had the Altra running for an hour or so today. It only takes an hour to do Einstein BRP4 work units, so I let it run for a bit and churn out 78 work units. It has an Ampere Altra 80 core (ARMv8) CPU running at 3GHz. I keep two cores available for other tasks.

Rosetta@home is out of work at the moment so no point running the Ryzen 5900X machines.