Farm news
Another hot week. I managed to get about 2 days of crunching going but we're all off at the moment. I don't see much chance of things improving for the next month or so.
Project news - Einstein
They've run out of the Arecibo data so the only things getting any of the BRP4 work now are the low-end devices such as the Raspberry Pi. There was an earthquake at Arecibo in January and they seem to closed for repairs at the moment. Arecibo also has funding issues. The BRP4G work units have run out as they were really 8 BRP4 work units bundled together. Einstein have other searches to keep the CPU's and GPU's busy though.
09 February 2014
04 February 2014
4th of February
Farm news
Nothing much happening again this week due to the heat. Its turned cool today so I have taken the opportunity to get the GPUgrid crunchers plus a few of the Intel GPU machines going for a day or two until the heat returns.
I started on the Raspberry Pi fan and have taken some photos which I will put up as a separate blog post. The Pi developers have come up with a FFT library that runs on the GPU and promises speed improvements of 10 times.
Not that I need another machine but I rescued an old Dell Dimension 4600 that was getting thrown out in a council clean-up this week. Apart from being full of dust it works fine. It had an XP Home license sticker so I have put an 80Gb hard disk into it and clean installed XP Home on it. Its only a Pentium 4 with 512Mb of memory. Microsoft is stopping support for XP on the 8th of April.
BOINC testing
We got 7.2.39 this week. They have given up on the sub-second CPU throttling after realising their "wrapper" can only work in 1 second intervals.
They added reporting to project servers every hour (in .38 I think) which I find rather annoying. Hopefully some of the projects will complain about the extra load it places on their servers.
Project news - Seti
They have released an Intel GPU app for multi-beam work units. I need to download the app and put it into my app_info when I get a chance.
Nothing much happening again this week due to the heat. Its turned cool today so I have taken the opportunity to get the GPUgrid crunchers plus a few of the Intel GPU machines going for a day or two until the heat returns.
I started on the Raspberry Pi fan and have taken some photos which I will put up as a separate blog post. The Pi developers have come up with a FFT library that runs on the GPU and promises speed improvements of 10 times.
Not that I need another machine but I rescued an old Dell Dimension 4600 that was getting thrown out in a council clean-up this week. Apart from being full of dust it works fine. It had an XP Home license sticker so I have put an 80Gb hard disk into it and clean installed XP Home on it. Its only a Pentium 4 with 512Mb of memory. Microsoft is stopping support for XP on the 8th of April.
BOINC testing
We got 7.2.39 this week. They have given up on the sub-second CPU throttling after realising their "wrapper" can only work in 1 second intervals.
They added reporting to project servers every hour (in .38 I think) which I find rather annoying. Hopefully some of the projects will complain about the extra load it places on their servers.
Project news - Seti
They have released an Intel GPU app for multi-beam work units. I need to download the app and put it into my app_info when I get a chance.
28 January 2014
28th of January
Farm news
We had a few hot days and then the Australia Day log weekend cooled off a bit. I managed to get a couple of days use out of the GPUgrid crunchers. It's been fairly warm during the day, so I am crunching at night. That is except for the Raspberry Pi's.
There is a parcel waiting down at the post office I suspect it's the 5 volt fans. Looks like I might be doing some soldering on the weekend. My initial thought was to wire them up to the GPIO pins on the Pi but being worried about frying the poor thing I might just grab an old USB cable and wire it up directly to a USB connector which I can then run off a power supply, at least until I can find out how much current the fans draw. I might also want to throw a resistor or 2 in line to reduce the fan speed as 4000 RPM is probably overkill and noisy.
Asteroids project news
They are doing another server upgrade, RAID disks again I believe, so they shut down on Monday and won't be black online for at least 3 days. They also ran out of work on Sunday, probably because everybody was trying to get enough work to see them through the outage.
We had a few hot days and then the Australia Day log weekend cooled off a bit. I managed to get a couple of days use out of the GPUgrid crunchers. It's been fairly warm during the day, so I am crunching at night. That is except for the Raspberry Pi's.
There is a parcel waiting down at the post office I suspect it's the 5 volt fans. Looks like I might be doing some soldering on the weekend. My initial thought was to wire them up to the GPIO pins on the Pi but being worried about frying the poor thing I might just grab an old USB cable and wire it up directly to a USB connector which I can then run off a power supply, at least until I can find out how much current the fans draw. I might also want to throw a resistor or 2 in line to reduce the fan speed as 4000 RPM is probably overkill and noisy.
Asteroids project news
They are doing another server upgrade, RAID disks again I believe, so they shut down on Monday and won't be black online for at least 3 days. They also ran out of work on Sunday, probably because everybody was trying to get enough work to see them through the outage.
18 January 2014
18th of January
Farm news
Not much to report, the farm has been off due to the heat, well all except the Raspberry Pi's who are still going. We're in the middle of a heat wave as it's our summer.
Speaking of the Pi's I have ordered a couple of small (60mm) 5 volt fans. The idea is to cut a hole in the top of the case and mount the fan on the top of the case. I am planning on powering them off the 5v GPIO pins.
Parallella news
They had a couple of companies inject some funds and as such are able to continue to make the boards. At last report they were up to donor number 90. At the moment they are waiting on boards and other components to become available. The next batch of boards are expected around the 28th of January (too late for Australia Day) and there will be approximately 1000, so it's still going to be a couple of months before I see mine. One of the moderators at Einstein@home has received his so there might be some apps available by the time I get mine.
Not much to report, the farm has been off due to the heat, well all except the Raspberry Pi's who are still going. We're in the middle of a heat wave as it's our summer.
Speaking of the Pi's I have ordered a couple of small (60mm) 5 volt fans. The idea is to cut a hole in the top of the case and mount the fan on the top of the case. I am planning on powering them off the 5v GPIO pins.
Parallella news
They had a couple of companies inject some funds and as such are able to continue to make the boards. At last report they were up to donor number 90. At the moment they are waiting on boards and other components to become available. The next batch of boards are expected around the 28th of January (too late for Australia Day) and there will be approximately 1000, so it's still going to be a couple of months before I see mine. One of the moderators at Einstein@home has received his so there might be some apps available by the time I get mine.
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