30 August 2015

30th of August

Farm news
New proxy server machine delivered and its up and running. Older one has been turned off but is still around - just in case.

I've been going through Windows 7 installed updates and deleting the Windows 10 ones off (the ones that are supposed to ease the migration to 10). I read that Microsoft are planning on putting the same telemetry onto Win 7 and 8 so its probably time to look more seriously at running Linux. I don't have anything of interest on my number crunchers but I do like to set them up MY way not the way Microsoft want and that is my main concern, well that and the fact they keep putting broken drivers out.

I finished off the batch of climate models. I need to check the climate prediction website regularly as you never know when new models will be released. Seti were running short of work so I did Asteroids work for a few days before switching back to running Seti tasks.


BOINC updates
We got 7.6.9 this week, which removes a feature they added in 7.6.8 to do with shutting down the core client when its started as a service. There is better reporting of ARM processor features if you're running Linux on an ARM. There is some formatting changes to numbers (thousands separators) and times (show days if greater than 24).


Raspberry Pi updates
They updated their Linux kernel from 3.16 to 4.1 even though they still have not switched over to Debian Jessie yet. You can run Jessie by changing the apt sources.list however the BOINC client in it is 7.4.23 and the current release version is 7.6.6.

22 August 2015

22nd of August

Farm news
The new proxy server bits have arrived at the shop and are being assembled. Not too sure if it will be finished this week or not. The current one is working fine so there is no urgency on this.

Seti had a couple of outages due to network changes on their end as well as their regular weekly outage, so I switch the machines to Asteroids when that happened. I currently get about 5 days a week on Seti and 2 days for Asteroids before switching back again.

Last week had a couple of cool days so I managed to get the GPUgrid cruncher going for quick burst. Their "long" work units take 12 hours each so I only managed to get about 4 work units done.

ClimatePrediction had some new ANZ work units which I missed the week before. This week there were some more and so I have all the Intel GPU machines crunching them. Due to the size of their upload files I am back to managing the uploads which keep getting backed up. I have some "spare" work units as I only run 4 at a time on the i7's. They will take until the middle of next week before they complete.


Hardware upgrades
Intel have announced (if not released) their 6th generation i5 and i7 CPU's. The i5-6600 and i7-6700 series. I am looking into getting the ASUS Z170 motherboard and i7-6700 as replacements for the 3rd generation (i7-3770) machines that I have. I am not too sure if the HD graphics 530 is useful for crunching or not yet.

09 August 2015

9th of August.

Farm news
Intel-GPU's mostly doing Seti but they had their regular weekly outage when the farm ran out of work. Then they had a special database backup running just before the weekend so I switched to running Asteroids for a day. Asteroids have also run out of work.

The two GPUgrid crunchers were running work for Asteroids and GPUgrid, but today was warm so the GPU's were set to finish off their work. Due to Asteroids running out of work I started a batch of Einstein work.

The Raspberry Pi's and Parallella's are doing Einstein BRP4 work.

With Windows 10 I am taking a wait and see approach after the initial problems. I might try installing it again in maybe a month or so. As an experiment I might try putting another hard disk into the backup file server and try installing Win 10 on it. Its an old Pentium 4 and only has 1Gb of memory so probably won't work.

04 August 2015

4th of August

Farm news
Intel-GPU's are still crunching away for Seti at the moment. We had a few warm days so no Nvidia GPU's were used until today. Currently one is running Seti. The Parallella's and Raspberry Pi's are doing Einstein work.

A new version of VirtualBox (v5) was released. I don't run any projects that use Vbox so I haven't installed it on any of the number crunchers.


Windows 10
Came out with a bang. Lots of interest and much nashing of teeth at the privacy options. You can turn them off as part of the install process, which it should really do by default. I highly recommend people disable most things unless you want it sharing everything about you, your contacts and WiFi passwords. I tried installing it on one of the Intel GPU crunchers. It got hung up installing the HD 4000 graphics driver from Intel, despite the fact I already had them installed. It didn't recognise the monitor so set itself into 1024x764 resolution (my monitors native resolution is 1680x1050). Despite that I spent a bit of time playing around with it. Edge, the new browser was quick as displaying web sites. It also reverted my windows time settings.

In the end I went back to Win7. It might behave better as a clean install but I think MS need to do some more work with the video drivers. It really should let me decide what one I want rather than trying the latest release. Nvidia users are also reporting similar issues where it decides what driver to install regardless of what the user wants. The one it installs doesn't work for number crunching. This was the Pro version too.