22 March 2010

Climate milestone

I managed to get to 250,000 for Climate Prediction this week. I think thats pretty good considering they take around 60 hours per work unit. Unfortunately they don't have a certificate.


Fermi
I've asked the computer shop to see how many Fermi based cards they are likely to be getting. They think it will be something like 20, but don't have a confirmed allocation at the moment, nor do they know what sort of cards they will be (GTX480 or GTX470). Add to that they don't know pricing either. Anyway i've asked for two GTX470's, depending on the price and availability of course.


Qui-Gon returns
Seeing as Maul is still off with the distributor I fired up Qui-Gon (an Acer quad-core machine). It was working fine for a while then it decided to reboot and keep the fans running at full speed. I went into the BIOS as it shows the CPU temperature. It looked fairly normal to me. I used a can of air and blew out the heatsink just in case. After that it refused to boot. That is until tonight when I tried it, a week after dusting it out. It booted up first go and is back to crunching some Einstein work.


BOINC versions
We had 6.10.39 last week and then it jumped up to 6.10.43 with a bunch of changes in the space of a couple of days. I've got it on two machines and it seems to be working fine. It has a number of improvements to the amount to CPU time the core client spends managing tasks.


Electricity
It seems the NSW state government has decided to bail out the electricity generators. They announced a 64% price increase over 3 years. This is on top of last years price increase to fund infrastructure upgrades.

11 March 2010

GPUgrid hits 8 million

Well I managed to crack the 8 million milestone for GPUgrid. Below is my certificate.




GPUgrid bonuses
They have tweaked the bonus so that its 50% if the work is returned within one day and 25% if returned with two days. This is to encourage more work to be returned as soon as possible. The results of one lot of work units are used to build the next set of work units, so they need them back ASAP.

07 March 2010

Another quiet week

Another fairly quiet week on the farm. The weather warmed up so only one machine was left running (Kirk). I was away for a few days and left it to do its thing. When I came back the room temperature was 33 degrees but it was still going :-) Anyway I turned it off and waited for things to cool down.


BOINC news
We got up to 6.10.36 earlier in the week. This has now become the recommended for all systems except Linux.

I like the resume of uploads. Climate Prediction and GPUgrid produce some big result files to upload and if the transfer is suspended it used to restart from the beginning, now it resumes from where its up to.

Another feature that may interest some people is the concept of a backup project (for those that want to crunch for a single project). It will only use the backup project when its out of work and can't get any for the primary project.


Maul off to be replaced
As mentioned last week Maul (its a ASUS P6T) went back to the shop. They have determined its a faulty motherboard and will be sending it off to the distributor. Hopefully it will get replaced fairly quickly. It still has a fair bit of work on it that was completed but couldn't be reported for Seti due to their last major outage.


Fermi firms up
Pricing it seems is based upon whatever they can get for it. Indications are the GTX480 will be $680 USD and GTX470 will be $299 USD. These are expected to be released in limited numbers only so the odds of getting one are fairly low. If certain web sites are to be believed then there will be less than 10,000 made.

01 March 2010

Autumn. Time for crunching

Not much to report this week. Weather was warm to hot until today, when like someone has thrown a switch its back to colder weather. Its also the 1st day of autumn. Being cool and wet has meant temps are down, so I have got 3 machines running as I type this.


Maul. No verdict
Checked with the computer shop on Friday to see if they have managed to find anything out about Maul and its 4Gb memory limit. They have some parts coming in so haven't managed to try certain things yet (like removing the cpu). They expect to swap the cpu for another one, if only temporarily, to see if that resolves things this week.

They did the obvious things like change the memory, but then i'd already ruled that out by using a known good set that I took out of Sulu, and have since put back.


BOINC news
I did offer my services as an alpha tester but never got a reply back. Hello Rom.

There are some rumblings of discontent by certain users. All very nice complaining, but none are volunteering to do any coding. If they really wanted to improve it then they should start doing something about it.

The current beta version is 6.10.35. Just a few minor changes in this one, so I haven't bothered putting it on any machine. In fact the most up to date machine was Maul and its off at the shop now.