18 February 2012

18th of February

Adventure saga
Well I reminded the case people that I had sent them the links to their own website. I also include pictures of the case from Japan and the Intel one (used to show off the Knights Corner cards). They don't think the case I had in mind will be able to handle the amount of heat. They think there is an alternative one that might be better suited to what I need, however no further news since then. I suppose I will have to call them again next week.

BOINC testing
Nothing new this week. Still running 7.0.15, although a Mac version of 7.0.16 has appeared today.

Farm news
Its been pretty quiet with the hot weather. I am trying to crunch a bit overnight when the temperatures drop.
I removed the graphics card from Obi-Wan and decided I will run it as a CPU only machine (its a Core 2 Quad) as the case isn't really designed to handle a graphics card producing all the heat. Seeing as its been off for 3 months it wanted a fair few updates to be applied, which I did to bring it up to date.

Orbit at Home
On the 8th of Feb they announced that their grant request to NASA had been rejected. No doubt one of many due to budget cuts. The Planetry Society who also support the project have started a campaign to try and address the imbalance of the cuts.

12 February 2012

12th of February

 


That folks is my GPUgrid badge, now that I have finally passed 50 million credits.


BOINC testing
7.0.15 came out late last week so I have updated the 2 test machines. They had a fix in this for gzipped files as WCG were having issues with the new up-compressing logic. I'm not on WCG so I hadn't noticed. They were working okay for CPDN. Its still got its GPU work fetch issue.


Farm news
I took the 750w Seasonic power supply back, but it turns out there was no reason to. While it only has 2 PCIe power connectors on the side of the power supply there are a number already hard-wired into it as well. Now its back home.

I went to upgrade Maul so it had 2 x GTX560Ti cards but it seems there isn't enough room for them. The 2nd PCIe slot leaves about 2 or 3mm from the 1st card, which means the fan won't get much air flow (its in the middle of the card). The 3rd PCIe slot is even better, the cables connecting various bits to the motherboard hit the fan and the power supply is about 5mm away from the fan. Again not ideal for air-flow. So its still only got 1 in there.

Still no news regarding the case for the Adventure 2800. I will chase them up next week.

I made another donation to GPUgrid, so they should have enough to get one of those new ATI graphics cards and look at getting it to work with their science app.


GPUUG news
The GPU Users Group got a huge donation from one of their members. It has finished off both the fund-raisers they had running and left some money over for whatever is next. A big thank you to Graham Middleton for his generosity.

05 February 2012

5th of February

Farm news
Well not much happening down on the farm this week. We got a few cool days so I managed to finish off the CPDN work units. I also managed to do a few GPUgrid work units. Today got above 30 degrees so the farm was off in the afternoon.

I rang the shop and will return the 750w Seasonic power supply that doesn't have sufficent PCIe power connectors. I will trade up to a 850w Seasonic which apparently has 4 PCIe power connectors.

I also rang the company that had the rack-mount case however they cannot find sufficent details on their web site. I need to give them links to their own site so they can find the information.


BOINC testing
7.0.14 came out so I have that on 2 machines. Why 2 when I normally only put alpha versions on 1 machine? Well this one has some changes around gzip file unzipping so I want to test that. I know CPDN has gzipped files, so I have it running a few CPDN work units to see how it handles them. Other than that there are a few minor tweaks.

I am still discussing cache testing with Dr Anderson, who didn't think my test was a valid one, but will have to see what his latest response is. Put simply I don't think it builds up a GPU cache (but it does for CPU) and believe its a bug that needs to get fixed before it can be released.

04 February 2012

Not happy Google

It seems blogger are forcing some changes upon us. Regular readers would have noticed that the format of the blog changed on the 2nd of February. I was so cheesed-off with them I went over to Wordpress to see if they are any better.

It turned out that I had IE9 in compatibility mode. Having turned it off the new format doesn't look much better and of course all the editing menus and so on have moved around and nothing seems to work the same as it did last week. Not happy Google.

02 February 2012

2nd of February

BOINC testing
We got 7.0.12 last week. It has a solution to the button auto-resizing. Now they are fixed width so that solves one annoying thing. Unfortunately it still doesn't build up a GPU cache. I have provided log samples to the developers so hopefully it won't take too long to fix.


Farm news
The beginning of the week was hot and humid. Everything was off (except the air conditioner). For the last couple of days its been cool and wet, so I have had a few machines going flat out. I am also trying to document the GPU cache issue so have 1 machine running for a while and then let it run down its cache before doing it all over again.

I have been trying to finish off the last couple of CPDN full-res ocean work units (only 13 hours left on one and 17 hours on the other).  The other CPDN work units usually give 6 to 9 months to complete, but not these, they want them back within 3 months and they are the longest running work units they have!

I have also been trying, when the weather permits, to get GPUgrid over the 50 million milestone. Unfortunately not too much progress there.

I got a replacement power supply to put into Maul so I can add another GTX560Ti into him. Its only got 2 PCIe power connectors (its a Seasonic 750w modular). I will have to return it for something with a higher power rating in order to get 4 PCIe power connectors. I still have the 1000w Corsair power supply that came out of Maul when I changed cases, however I was saving it to use with the Adventure.

Speaking of the Adventure, the shop have given up trying to find a suitable rack-mount case. I did a bit of Googling yesterday and managed to find a company in Sydney that does all sorts, including something that looks like it will do the job. I will be calling them tomorrow to see what I can arrange.