27 March 2011

All home

Milestones
Nothing new this week, creeping up on something for GPUgrid.


BOINC testing
6.12.19 came out at the end of the week, so I haven't had a chance to put in on anything yet. Mostly minor fixes. There is a fix for the screen-saver crashing, but I don't use the BOINC screen saver anyway.


Kirk graphics card
I had this machine off during the week. When the weather cooled down on Friday I went to start it up and it refused to boot and just gave error beeps. After digging out a manual to find out what the beep codes were it was complaining about the graphics card. I removed the GTX295 from it and put a GTX460 in there to get it going.

It seems I might need to look at getting the Palit GTX570 Sonic Platinum cards. I am hoping the release on Thursday of the new GTX590 will force the price of the GTX570 to drop, so I can get them a bit cheaper.


New server back
Its finally been sorted out by the shop. The faulty hard drive got replaced a couple of weeks ago and now the memory has been replaced as well. I picked it up on Saturday, but have yet to get him out of the box and swap the functions over from the old P4.


Windows 7 SP1
The DVD arrived just before the weekend, so I ran around updating the machines on Friday and Saturday. They take around an hour to do each machine, except Kirk which has an SSD. It only took about 15 minutes to complete.

20 March 2011

20th of March

Milestones
I passed 50 million for all projects this weekend. Below is my BOINCstats image.




BOINC testing
We are still on 6.12.18 this week. No major issues. There is some discussion going on about the notices and what people would like to see.


Project news - ClimatePrediction
They finally sorted out their space issues and I have managed (after 2 weeks) to upload the last results for the EU work units that I was running. I have since downloaded another 8 to crunch. I run them 2 at a time and suspend the others.

The Famous experiment they were running has almost finished. They have processed 200,000 work units and will generate a some more to finalise the experiment.


Project news - Seti
They seem to have run out of work this weekend. No major issue if you have a couple of projects running like me.


IE9 is out
I'm running it on one machine. Unfortunately its not available for Windows XP so I probably won't be updating the other machines. Its definately faster than IE8 and probably a bit more secure too.

I was going to try Google Chrome as well and see how it works out. At least it should work under Windows XP.

13 March 2011

13th of March

Milestones
Nothing this week, although I am close to 50 million credits for all projects.


QCN
It stands for Quake Catcher Network. Its a BOINC project that use a motion sensor (either in a laptop or attached via USB). Last week I ordered a couple of USB sensors. They come in kit form as you can see below. Some assembly required. Actually you need to solder the 4 wires onto the circuit board and then put it into the plastic box. The circuit board is approx 1 inch square.





So mine is now setup, although not in a very good location at the moment. The software runs within BOINC as a non-CPU intensive app (doesn't seem to use any CPU according to task manager) just monitoring the sensor.


BOINC testing
We got up to 6.12.18 this week. Its mainly fine tuning the notices and work-fetch at the moment. I've put it on a couple of machines and its working okay for me.

There was one user who has a 160 CPU machine that doesn't seem to be able to get more than 60 CPUs recognised. If only the rest of us had this problem :) It seems Windows groups the CPU's into processor groups of not more than 64, so scheduling tasks across all of them is somewhat different than a smaller system.. They have made some coding changes to allow for this, but we will have to wait for another build.

07 March 2011

7th of March

Kirk back home
It seems they might have actually fixed him up. It has spent the entire weekend doing work, mainly Einstein which is particularly memory intensive.

I had a couple of BSOD's but they were caused by GPUgrid and the nvidia driver commiting suicide. I deleted a file out of the GPUgrid slot directory to stop it crashing everytime I started BOINC. When I next started BOINC up it deleted everything to do with GPUgrid. I then had to reattach to the project.

I had this problem with the other machine that has a GTX295. I believe its an issue with cuda 3.1 not knowing which GPU is doing what, as it doesn't happen on my single-gpu machines.

05 March 2011

5th of March

Milestones
None this week.


BOINC testing
We got 6.12.16 today. It has a number of changes around the notices area. I will be putting it on a machine later tonight.


Kirk home
Yes he finally came home. It also has a SSD in it. It doesn't really need one. I'm not too sure why I got it, but anyway it there now. So far its managed to finish off its work successfully, so i've given it a full load along with a couple of GPUgrid tasks. We'll see how it handles them.

The 120mm fan on the back of the case was rattling, so I got them to replace it with a Noctua while I was there. It would seem the CoolerMaster fans aren't too reliable as its the 2nd one I have had to replace so far.


Project news - Climate Prediction
Its seems we can't upload or get any work from them at the moment. I have a couple of completed EU tasks on one machine that have been trying to upload for a couple of days and the trickles can't get through either.

From checking on their web site it appears they are doing some database maintenance that is running longer than expected.


Project news - GPUgrid
It seems nvidia have jumped to Cuda 4.0 (well its in release candidate mode for a March release). The GPUgrid guys are just going to skip 3.2 and go to 4.0 for the next app. They will still support Cuda 3.1 for those people running older drivers.


Project selection
Given Orbit has gone into hibernation I have detached all the machines from it except Maul. I left him on it even though its not likely to get any work, so that way I will know if they come back online.

At the moment Maul and Obi-Wan are doing Seti work almost exclusively, the others are running a mixture of Climate Prediction, Einstein and GPUgrid.


Weather
It turned cooler today, so I have 4 machines running flat-out at the moment, including Kirk. They have managed to get through a fair bit of work so we might get near a milestone or two in about a week.