21 August 2009

ATI

This week in review:

Graphics cards
Got myself an ATI HD4850 video card today. The shop must have seen me coming as it was sitting on the counter when I walked in. I'm not too sure which machine i'll be putting it in yet, probably try it in Maul and see if the ATI drivers will play nice with the Nvidia drivers.

Part of the reason for the ATI graphics card was because BOINC 6.10 was released earlier in the week with ATI support. Now all we need are some science apps that will work properly under BOINC using the ATI cards. There are science apps that use the ATI, they just doesn't run under BOINC.

I have ordered three GTX295 graphics cards to go into the new i7's. If they work out i'll replace the GTX275 thats in Kirk with one as well. These ones are supposed to be the newer single circuit board ones.

Quaddies decommissioned
I have cleaned off two of the quaddies and shut them down. I'm not too sure if I should remove the GTS250 cards, power supply and put the old power supply back in and sell them or just sell them with the GTS250's. Its not urgent to dispose of them as the other i7's won't be available for a couple of weeks.

Future plans
As mentioned before the current plan is to have 4 x i7's running. These will replace the existing i7 and all the quaddies, one of which has already gone to a new home. I had this vague idea that I might get an AMD 6 core machine and put 3 graphics cards in (the x2 variety so it has 6 gpus) and all it does is feed the graphics cards. I need to do a bit more research into this before it happens. The x2 graphics cards (ATI or Nvidia) use a lot of power so this may not be feasable.

Projects back
Einstein have got their file server back online after almost a week. It doesn't appear to have lost any work. Seti are now also pumping out work, so I have finished the Climate prediction work, which was only added because I didn't have any other working projects at the time.

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