Running slowly

Hot weather has returned so the farm is working in between.

As well as the weather the Raspberry Pi foundation released Raspberry Pi OS based on Debian Trixie on the 1st of October. I have been updating the support nodes to see how things work out. The only major change is the swap space is now 2GB and they're using zram for swap. I've updated all the Pi5's but have yet to update the Pi4 compute nodes.

Another quirk I found was the "lite" version doesn't include nfs-common so after getting stuck I found out you have to install it before you can use an nfs mounted drive. The full version or Raspberry Pi OS (ie with a desktop) includes nfs-common.

September update

The farm is still running 24/7. We had a few hot days earlier in the week, where I had the farm idle (ie running but not doing any tasks). 

Asteroids@home seems to have disappeared so I removed it from all the Pis.

Debian trixie was released and I am waiting for an updated version of Raspberry Pi OS. I've upgraded all my x86-64 machines.

I purchased more micro SD cards, the Sandisk high endurance ones so I should be ready to replace all of them once Raspberry Pi OS is available. The shop had 256GB cards available but the price was too high and I don't think I need that much disk space. I settled for 32GB cards instead being the cheapest of the high endurance variety. Most of my Pi's have older Sandisk Ultra 16GB cards at the moment which seem to last around a year to 18 months before I have to replace them.

 

Still crunching Aug 2025

Marks Rpi Cluster is continuing to run 24/7 and getting through work. Its doing Einstein. Asteroids still haven't re-applied their Pi optimizations so I am sticking with Einstein for the time being.

 

Rpi OS based on Debian trixie

Debian Trixie is due for release on the 9th of August. Raspberry Pi OS is based on Debian. The Rpi foundation said that they aren't likely to have any major updates until they upgrade to Trixie. Last time Debian updated (approx 2 years ago) there was quite a few months before Raspberry Pi OS caught up so hopefully it won't take too long this time.

Most of my Pi's run headless (no screen and keyboard) and I run the "lite" version which doesn't include a desktop environment so I probably won't see much change, although there are a lot of improvements to apt, the package manager that Debian use.

I will be trying it on a Pi5 first to see what works and what has changed before imaging a bunch of SD cards. To do the EC12's I will have to open up each one to get to the SD card slots on each Pi. I do a clean install from scratch rather than attempting to upgrade from the previous OS. Earlier versions of Rpi OS didn't officially support upgrading the operating system.

 

Still running

The farm is still running and still doing Einstein BRP4 work. I tried the Asteroids@home work but they have a problem with their app missing some optimizations that make them take longer than before and they make the Pi's run hotter. The farm consists of:

2 x Pi5 (4GB) as support nodes.
4 x Pi5 (4GB) as compute nodes.
24 x Pi4 (8GB) as compute nodes.

We're in winter at the moment in Sydney, Australia so the farm is running 24/7 at the moment. The farm is currently on 36,094,879 credits with a recent average of 42,759 credits.

  

As mentioned in previous posts I would like to update the farm to all Pi5 nodes, however the Edge Cluster that I use for the Pi4's doesn't support them. There has been no news from BitScope regarding Pi5 support.

I wouldn't be surprised if there is a Pi6 coming soon as the Raspberry Pi foundation have updated the Compute module 5, Pi500 and Pi5 to all use the BCM2712 as well as releasing a Pi5 with 16GB of memory.

With the fake numa node settings it would appear recent Rpi OS updates have been automatically enabling it. While I tried it on the Pi4's I didn't notice any advantage for them, but it certainly make a difference with the Pi5's.