27 September 2015

27th of September

Farm status
Intel GPU's are running a mix of Climate Prediction regional work units (CPU) and Einstein on their GPU's.

The Nvidia GPU's are also running some Climate Prediction regional work (CPU) and nothing on their GPU's. There are no "short" GPUgrid work units available for the GPUgrid crunchers.

The Pi's and Parallella's are running Einstein BRP work


Win10 upgrades
I spent a bit of time running around to each machine upgrading them to Windows 10. I had one of the Intel GPU machines fail complaining about being unable to boot, but a subsequent attempt worked fine.

I have also updated the GPUgrid machines however they don't have any short work units available so haven't been able to check them. They had an old version of EVGA Precision (2.03) installed on these machines and it didn't work so I need to get a more up to date version. I usually use Precision to control the fan speeds as the cards are already factory overclocked.

I still have the 6 core/12 thread machines to do but wanted to see how the Nvidia drivers work (or don't) under Win10 before doing them.

So far I haven't had many issues, just finding out where things are in Win10 has been the biggest problem. I use the OO-Shut Up program to set a lot of the privacy setting and then work my way through the settings panel for the others. I remove some of the junk they give you like the Xbox app which a dedicated number cruncher really needs. To do that you use powershell commands. I turn off a few services and fiddle with the time synchronisation. I put the old task manager on them and finally let Ccleaner loose to clean things up.

19 September 2015

19th of September

Farm news
Raspberry Pi's and Parallella's are running Einstein BRP4 work.

The Intel GPU machines were up until a few hours ago running Seti work, however there is no network connection to Seti or BOINC at the moment. I have switched them over to Asteroids for the time being.

The Nvidia GPU machines have been resting.


Windows 10
I have updated a couple of the Intel GPU machines from Windows 7 to Windows 10. Apart from having to set all the privacy settings and set things up again they seem to be working fine. If there are no problems for a week or so I will update the rest of the Intel GPU machines.

The only reason why I didn't switch to Linux is because setting up a GPU to work with Linux is such a pain and usually doesn't work. If the Linux distro people could get them to work out of the box then I would have switched to Linux.

A number of the Win 7 machines are silently downloading Win 10 despite my removing various windows updates. The file server has also copped the telemetry updates which Microsoft seems to consider mandatory. Apart from MS snooping they seem to want to force people onto Windows 10. A cynical person would suggest that the NSA had a hand in this current direction that Microsoft is going down. Well I haven't got anything to hide as most of my machines are dedicated number crunchers with nothing else on them.

05 September 2015

5th of September

Farm news
The Intel GPU machines spend most of the week doing Seti and then turned to Asteroids. A few ANZ climate models were release by ClimatePrediction so all the Intel GPU machines are crunching them now.

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

A couple of the Nvidia GPU's have been started up this weekend and are doing Seti work.


Parallella and Ubuntu
I found an updated Parallella image that was released 30th of Jan 2015. It is based on Trusty (14.04 which is a long term support release) however it has a more up to date kernel. I have downloaded it and then gone through the process of reapplying my usual changes. This image seems to behave better than the image I had before which I believe is because of kernel and firmware related fixes.

I'm running off the remaining Einstein BRP4 work units and then I will switch over to this newer release. This also gives me the opportunity to get a later BOINC client onto them via LoctusOfBorg's ppa.


BOINC release
The 7.6.9 that I was testing became the release version last week, so if you're running an older version I'd suggest you upgrade to this one.


Future hardware
I mentioned last week the i7-6700 series of CPU's. After looking on the Intel web site today there is some more information. It seems there is an i7-6700K which is 4 core 8 threads running at 4Ghz with a TDP of 91 watts. The only one listed two weeks ago. There are quite a few listed now. There is an i7-6700 4 core 8 threads running at 3.4Ghz with a TDP of 65 watts. I am interested in this lower wattage version at the moment.