27th of June

Marks Rpi Cluster continues to run as I reduce the number of Pi3's. I'll be upgrading to Pi4's. Currently I have 2 x Pi4 4GB, 1 x Pi4 8GB and a couple of Pi4 2GB as support nodes.

In cluster news, the 3 x Pi4 are transitioning back to running Rosetta work. Rosetta ran out of work so I had them doing Einstein instead. The other Pi3's (10 of them) are running Einstein.

Give-away

I've removed 12 of the Pi3's from service and I am giving them away for free. The lucky winners will have to be in Australia though. I don't want to spend much on postage. They come in 3 of my Pi^4 cases (4 Pi3's in each case, 2 x 60MM fans on top) with USB power cables and I will even throw in the USB chargers that I have been using to run them. See http://marksrpicluster.blogspot.com/2018/03/pi4-case-mk-ii.html

If anyone wants the Pi2's they can have them too. Once again limited to Australia. They're in a variety of different cases. I have 4 of them and a single PiB (sometimes called the Pi1B) in a case.

If you are interested leave a comment with your email address. If you want one or all of them mention that too. Comments don't get automatically published - I have to approve them.

Trying Raspberry Pi OS 64 bit

I received a Pi4 8GB so thought I would try it using the new Raspberry Pi OS 64 bit. At the moment there is only a full version. Normally I use Raspbian lite as my Pi's are running headless (no screen or keyboard). It just means its a bigger download.

It installed as normal and the setup process is just the same as for Raspbian. After I got it going the first thing I did was to remove the desktop with a "sudo apt remove x11-*" command followed by a "sudo apt autoremove". Then I updated it with a "sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade" command as there are a few updates. After the updates and a reboot it reports:

Linux *** 5.4.42-v8+ #1319 SMP PREEMPT Wed May 20 14:18:56 BST 2020 aarch64 GNU/Linux

That means its running a 5.4 kernel. For comparison Debian buster is using the 4.19 kernel. Here is the output from a free command to see how much memory its got:

              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:        8054896     1421728     4474672         380     2158496     6507884
Swap:        102396           0      102396

Given its really running Debian adding buster-backports is a 1 line change to /etc/apt/sources.list and adding "deb http://deb.debian.org/debian buster-backports main" to the end, without the quotes. There is no need to add signing keys because its already using the Debian repositories.

Getting the latest BOINC is a simple matter of typing "apt install -t buster-backports boinc-client" which will get you the 7.16.1 version as I type this.

There is no need to use an <alt_platform> tag in the cc_config.xml to get aarch64 apps. I did have to download the aarch64 Einstein BRP4 app written by user N30DG and install it. Unfortunately I did this before I had attached to the Einstein project and had an issue with ownership of the einstein projects folder. A "sudo chown boinc:boinc /var/lib/boinc-client/* -R" command fixed that.

I've run one Einstein BRP4 task through using the optimized app. Run time was around 3 hours. By comparison the 32 bit app from the project takes 7 hours. Memory usage was 193MB using the optimized app compared to 133MB for the project app. That means its possible to run 4 at a time on a 1GB Pi3. I will have to try that some other time.

I have 3 Rosetta tasks running on it at the moment (they were running at the same time as the Einstein task). They normally take 8 hours and have been going for 3 hours now.

Overall its a much better experience than trying to run Raspbian with a 64 bit kernel. The extra memory will come in handy for the Rosetta apps, some of their work units use 1.5GB. With my Pi4 4GB I have had to limit them to only running 3 tasks at a time. As this is still considered beta expect frequent updates as the Raspberry Pi foundation resolve issues.

Update - 5 July
I have converted all the Pi4's to Raspberry Pi OS (64 bit).

One bug I noticed is if the Bluetooth and WiFi modules are blacklisted it complains about /dev/wifi not being accessible to rfkill. It doesn't complain under Raspbian.

Progress as of 7th of June

This is where Marks Rpi Cluster was on the 7th of June. A total credit of 7.925,948 with an average of 3,613 credits. Not as much as 50 days ago but its starting to climb back up.

Currently the cluster has two Pi4 4GB models doing Rosetta and 10 Pi3 doing Einstein BRP4 work.


Pi4 news
Following the announcement of the 8GB Pi4 model B, I had a look around at the couple of suppliers I get them from. Both were out of stock. Element14 (who are one of the worldwide distributors) has them back ordered into August and the other supplier had a limit of 1 per customer with stock arriving in a week. Given the memory some of the Rosetta work units use, the Pi4 4GB can only run 3 tasks at a time so the 8GB model is the one to get.

I haven't tried the new Raspberry Pi OS (64 bit) yet, although one of the users at Einstein had success running Rosetta work on a Pi4 8GB. His Pi appears to be running Debian buster with a 5.4 kernel. I would have to take one of my current Pi4's out of service while I experiment with it, which I don't want to do at the moment. It is more important that they run Rosetta work.

Update:
Ordered one Pi4 8GB, power supply and a case.