15th of May

Farm news

We're still running ClimatePrediction ANZ models. They must have finished off the 1st batch last week because I had almost run out of work when they seem to have produced another 5,000 work units, presumably the 2nd batch.

I was running 4 of the ANZ models at a time on the i7's and manually picking up Asteroids work to use the remaining 4 cores. This time I have changed to running 7 at a time and tough for CPU cache contention. I've allowed one free core :-)

Parallella news

They arrived late last week. I have copied the disk image to the micro-SD card and of course they don't want to work. I am now downloading the image again and will try writing it again. Not sure why I am having trouble as its a similar process to write the Raspberry Pi SD cards and they work fine. I've tried 3 different micro-SD cards between both parallella's.

I need to add a fan to the case, something similar to what I did with the Raspberry Pi. The Parallella's need forced-air over the heatsink on the Zinq 7020. Also there aren't any air holes in the case, just some cut outs for the various connectors. I'll share some pictures once I've got one working.

30th of April

Farm news
The entire Intel GPU cluster are still crunching CPDN work. They have plenty of work available for the ANZ models that I am currently concentrating on.

I upgraded a couple of the Raspberry Pi's to Debian Jessie and they appear to be working fine so far. See my previous blog post about the process I used.

I got a couple of Windows XP updates yesterday, which is well after the end of XP support. Not sure if Microsoft had a change of heart or not. There is a bug being reported for Internet Explorer that effects all versions, but we don't think Microsoft will release a fix for XP. I use Chrome on the remaining XP boxes anyway. You can't actually remove IE as its so imbedded into the operating system. You can use other browsers and make then the default of course.


Parallella news
Update 23 earlier this week told us they had shipped up to backer 2,999 and expected the remaining board to go out within a week. They have finished assembling all boards. They also showed a photo of an Epiphany 64 coprocessor equipped board.

Yesterday I got a shipping notification from them, so hopefully I will have mine soon. Its only been about 2 years since I backed the project on KickStarter.

The volunteer working on a Parallella application for Einstein is struggling to use the Epiphany coprocessor. Unfortunately it lacks the memory to do the FFT (Fast Fourier Transforms) that the project use. It looks like it will only be able to make use of the dual core ARM processor for number crunching.

25th of April

Its ANZAC day here in Australia.


Farm news
Crunching of CPDN work continues. I keep getting stuck uploads that I have to use the dial-up to get them unstuck. It gets a bit time consuming but better than wasting 110 hours of computing.


RPi upgrade
I did another attempt at upgrading one of the Raspberry Pi's from Debian Wheezy to Debian Jessie (the testing release). This time seems to have been a success and its got BOINC 7.2.42 running on it from the repository.

The process I used was:
1. Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and change it to read:
deb http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian/ jessie main contrib non-free rpi
2. Do a sudo apt-get update command
3. Get a cup of tea while it updates the list of packages
4. Do a sudo apt-get dist-upgrade command
5. Make a pot of tea and drink it
6. Do a sudo apt-get autoremove command
7. Do a sudo apt-get autoclean command

The dist-upgrade took me around an hour with a few questions as it goes along. The last time I tried this I got stuck on one of the questions, this time I took the defaults. You don't actually have to do steps 6 and 7, its simply to free up space by getting rid of the old packages.

I took a snapshot of the SD card before doing the upgrade so if it goes horribly wrong at least you can reimage the SD card. Also if your Pi is running BOINC work its best to finish it off and report it before starting.

15th of April

Farm news
Were running ClimatePrediction ANZ models at the moment. Currently the entire Intel-GPU cluster plus one of the Nvidia GPU machines are on the case Mixed in with them I'm also running Asteroids work.


XP end of support
April 8th came and went. The few Windows XP machines that I have are still working after XP support ended. They picked up a few patches on the 8th and that should be it. I could upgrade a couple of them if I want to spend the money, however they would need memory upgrades to be able to run Win 7. None of them are particularly fast and its not really worth the effort.