29 May 2011

29th of May

Milestones
I passed 34 million for GPUgrid. See I am making those GTX570's do some work.


Farm news
I went away last weekend and as the tradies were doing the bathroom again on Monday I left everything off for 3 days.

I finished off my other Full Resolution Ocean work unit for Climate Prediction. It took 528 hours to complete.

I am now getting the S6Bucket work units from Einstein. They are the S6 run of the gravity wave data.


Project news - Climate Prediction
They still don't have any work available. They are reconfiguring servers and moving files around. This is taking longer than they expected. Until the reconfigure has finished no new work will be generated.


Project news - Seti
Their storage server died and so they stopped work unit creation as well as uploads and downloads being  effected. Apparently its now fixed but due to the number of people trying to upload and download the network is maxed out and nothing is moving.

16 May 2011

Power nap

This week wasn't that productive. I've had various builders running around demolishing a leaking shower and the rotten floor under it. The machines were all off and unplugged at the beginning of the week. Its the same again this week as they have decided the whole of the bathroom floor needs to be replaced.

Milestones
Despite the destruction of the bathroom I managed to pass 33 million for GPUgrid.


CPDN full ocean work units
I managed to finish off my first one. It took 511 hours to complete. Its been uploaded and reported. I still have another one running on a different machine and its 65% through at the moment, so another 9 days of crunching before its done.


Project news - CPDN
They are out of work. They have some projects in the works but due to storage issues (the work units product some huge files) they might be holding off creating more work units until they can get some of the ones being crunched back.


Project news - Einstein
They are having an open day on Saturday the 2nd of June at AEI Hannover.

Apart from that they also have a new type of work unit designated the S6Bucket. I haven't managed to pick any of these up yet so can't provide any details about them.

08 May 2011

8th of May

Milestones
Passed 32 million for GPUgrid during the week.


GTX570 installed
I put the other Palit GTX570 Sonic Platinum card into Sulu during the weekend. I hit a minor snag as the power connector had an 8 pin-only PCIe plug, but it turned out to be a 6 to 8 pin adaptor. The GTX50 needs two 6 pin PCIe power cables plugged in, whereas the old GTX295 needed 6 and an 8 pin power cable.


QCN sensors
The company I bought these through shipped me another pair of them. I only placed one order in March. They seem to have processed the order twice. Rather than send them back I will keep them. I have let them know and they'll give them to me at a discount seeing as I didn't make two orders.


Project update - Seti@home
They have started recording data from the Green bank radio telescope this weekend. While we don't expect to be able to process it immediately, as there is some mapping of the data to a common format and some other software development required, there is some hope it will happen soon.

We've also been prompting them to see if they can use the data from the Parkes radio telescope. At the moment they don't have any agreement for data sharing or a data recorder in place.


BOINC tasks
This is an add-on program that was written by a fellow cruncher for monitoring a group of machines (up to 60). Its quite similar to the old favorite BOINCview, which is getting rather out of date. I have installed it on my old laptop to see how it goes, and its quite good now, supporting some of the new functions such as Notices which are only in the development versions of BOINC.

You can grab a copy from http://www.efmer.eu/

01 May 2011

1st of May

Milestones
Passed 32 million for GPUgrid. Einstein is also coming up on one.


Allen Telescope Array hibernation
This was initially funded by Microsoft founder Paul Allen, however the SETI institute has run out of money to keep it running. This has no impact on Seti@home. Despite press reports saying S@H is effected, its not. The SETI institute and Seti@home are two separate organisations. S@H doesn't even get data from the ATA. For more details see the Q&A link below from Dr Eric Korpela of the Seti@home project:

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=63888


BOINC testing
After last weeks issues caused by the Microsoft security patch we now have 6.12.26. So far its got a few minor things that I have picked up, but nothing that would prevent it being released to the public.


CPDN full resolution ocean wu
As I mentioned last week I have picked up one last week. It has been crunching away for the last 138 hours and is about one third complete. So another couple of weeks at least before its done. I have also managed to get another one on a 2nd machine, so it will be running for the next 21 days as well. The current estimate is 509 hours to complete them on a standard i7-920.


GTX570
I still haven't put the 2nd Palit GTX570 into a machine yet. I am planning on swapping out the GTX295 that is in Sulu. I will be selling off the older card.


Processing 24/7
Now the cooler weather is with us in the southern hemisphere, I have been running more of the computers. In additional the CPDN work units need so long to crunch that I have left those (now 2) machines running 24/7 so they can meet the project deadlines.