Easter weekend 2023

After a 4 month hiatus we're back to crunching. The main issue was with the weather being hot and I won't use air conditioning. My discounted electricity rate also went from a 21% discount down to 5% and the rates also went up around 20% so I am being frugal with my crunching.

Since I was gone the Pi's have mostly been running, but even they had a break for almost a month. If you want to read about them see Marks Rpi Cluster

 

Current config
As of writing (10th of April 2023) the farm consists of:
2 x Ryzen 5900X machines
1 x Ampere Altra
4 x Ryzen 3600 with RTX 3060Ti GPUs
and Marks Rpi Cluster.

 

Future upgrades
Last time I posted I was looking at updating the Ryzen 5900X machines to Ryzen 7900X machines. Since then AMD have released the non-X CPUs which are faster than the 5900X but have a 65 watt TDP (they actually use more). My current thinking is maybe getting the non-X CPU's instead, but it still needs a new motherboard for the AM5 socket and DDR5 memory which isn't cheap.

Nvidia released their 4000 series of GPU's which are disappointing. Apart from using much more power the pricing is also somewhat higher so I will probably skip this entire generation of GPU's and see what comes next.

22nd of December

Farm status
CPU only
Idle. Have been running early mornings.

Nvidia GPUs
Off

Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP4 work.

For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster


Other news
I have been running the Ryzen 5900X machines early in the morning for the Universe@home project. They are an astronomy project studying black holes at the moment. The 5900X can do their work units between 30 minutes and 1 hour when running 24 at a time.

I had another look at the cost of upgrading the Ryzen 5900X to Zen 4 and its still rather expensive. In addition there doesn't seem to be any 32GB DDR5 memory modules available that can do 6GHz which is the sweet-spot for Zen 4. There are a few 16GB modules but they don't recommend using 4 memory modules due to timing issues. Another concern is the power consumption that a Zen 4 CPU will use and the additional cooling needed.

13th of November

Farm status
CPU only
Off.

Nvidia GPUs
Off.

Raspberry Pis
Running overnight.

For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster


Other news
As you can see all the big crunchers are off. Its summer in Sydney so it can get hot. While I have air conditioning I won't use it to cool the farm, I would rather turn the farm off. Not only is this better for the environment but it also saves my electricity bill.


Intel ARC
I had a quick look at the Intel ARC A770 but decided not to get one. The Linux support for them hasn't landed in Debian yet and performance is about the same as the RTX 3060 Ti, which I already use. To do a firmware update one has to use the Intel Management Engine, which of course is only available on Intel based motherboards. Lastly BOINC and the BOINC-based projects don't currently support them. This should improve over time but I think its too early to get one.

9th of October

Farm status
CPU only
Running Universe@home part time.

Nvidia GPUs
Off

Raspberry Pis
Running Einstein@home BRP4 work.

For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster


Ryzen 7000 availability
I priced an upgrade for my Ryzen 5900X machines. I would need a new CPU (Ryzen 7900X) at $949, Noctua NH-U12A cooler at $199, ASUS X670-P motherboard at $499 and lastly 64GB of DDR5-5600 memory at $599. Giving a total of $2,246 in AUD.

I would aim for faster memory as the sweet spot for the Ryzen 7900X is 6GHz and that would cost more of course, assuming I could even find it. Oh and then there are NVMe drives.

As I see it we aren't quite there yet. DDR5 memory is too expensive, not much faster than DDR4 and in too small capacities. You can't even get PCIe gen 5 NVMe drives at the moment. Its going to take a while for the 6.0 kernel to get into a stable Linux release giving the necessary driver support. I think I will have to wait a bit longer.