28 April 2013

28th of April

Another month almost gone. Time flies when you are having fun.

In farm news this fortnight, not much done last week as I was away and the farm was running in minimal mode. That usually means overnight and minimal cache settings, so no crunching during the day. My internet provider (TPG Internet) has download limits (they have a peak and off-peak download limit, however their off-peak is only 6 hours - 2:30am to 8:30am).

Anyway I am still concentrating on getting Asteroids to 1 million credits for the moment. The last time I looked I was on 900,000. That would suggest maybe another fortnight (depends on how many machines and how long they are allowed to crunch) before I get there.


BOINC testing
We got 7.0.64 a bit over a week ago, there was a quick fix (7.0.65) for Linux and Mac's. This became the release version. I still need to update a few machines to it. 7.0.65 hasn't made it into the Debian repository yet (it still has 7.0.27) so the Raspberry Pi's haven't been updated either.


Nvidia GTX780 and 770 rumours
There are rumours doing the rounds that Nvidia will release a GTX780 and a GTX770 next month. The specs are still a bit unknown but the GTX770 sounds like it would make a good GPU cruncher. Having said that those people who rushed out to buy the Titan still don't have many projects to choose from. The GPUgrid apps fail on them.


Parallella update
They issued update #33 last week. They have some production boards coming in now so once they validate them it sounds like they'll be able to get into full production soon. It will be interesting to see how they perform using their 16 (or 64) core Epiphany chip as a coprocessor running OpenCL apps.

10 April 2013

10th of April

I haven't updated my stats in a while. At the moment most of the farm is concentrating on Asteroids@home. I am currently on 600,000 credits and I am trying to get to 1 million credits.


BOINC testing
We got 7.0.60 late last week. The main change in this is to correct an XML parsing bug that appeared with CPDN. They run a really old version of BOINC on their servers.

I expect there will some other minor changes before its ready for release. There was one particular crashing bug one of the guys found. I also raised a query as to why the Raspberry Pi doesn't report its CPU information.

The resource share bug still seems to be in this, however the client seems to alternate between projects so it may be doing the right thing over the longer term. In the 6.x versions it would run the appropriate resource shares of projects all at the same time. The 7.x version is designed to be less monotonous.


Project news - Einstein
I asked last week what is going to happen with the BRP4 single DM app that I am testing with the Raspberry Pi's. It looks like their current plan is:
  1. Introduce a BRP5 search using data from the Parkes Perseus Arm survey
  2. The current BRP4 search will become CPU only
  3. Allow the BRP4 search to do single DM work units


Project news - Seti
Their server relocation went surprisingly well. Apart from having staff available 24 hours a day to kick machines when needed they have better cooling and power. In addition they seem to have much better network bandwidth.

Looking at the new Cricket graphs it seems its running at 350Mbit instead of the capped 100Mb they had before. This means transfers are now much quicker and no more getting backed off. With this improvement I will now resume Seti crunching, especially once Asteroids gets to 1 million.


02 April 2013

2nd of April

Well its just past midnight as I write this, so we're into the 2nd of April.


BOINC testing
We got 7.0.59 at the end of last week. It has a fix to the resource shares issue that I indicated in previous posts. While things have improved it still has issues. There was a mention by Dr Anderson that there would be another fix required to make it behave.


Donations
I made donations to both Asteroids and GPUgrid, even though I haven't been able to run much GPUgrid work in the last 6 months. I hope this will enable both projects to continue their work. Unfortunately I can't claim tax deductions for either project.


Farm news
No much happening on the farm. I have been running 7.0.59 as mentioned above on a few machines to see how it behaves.

The Pi's continue on the way without a hiccup these days. I have attached all of them to both Albert and Asteroids as both projects support the Raspberry Pi. Albert is the Einstein beta test project, so usually as they get things tested they then put them across to the main project. I am not sure how long they will want to beta-test the Raspberry Pi application.


Seti server relocation
Just a reminder that the Seti server relocation will start in the next couple of hours and take at least 3 days. Personally I think it will take them a week to iron out any issues but we will just have to wait and see.

We don't know if the Cricket graph (it shows the network bandwidth usage) will be available once the move is complete. Its very useful to see how the network is holding up.