Progress as of 28 December 2020

This is where Marks Rpi Cluster is at as of the 28th of December for Einstein@home. Total credit is 9,259,261 and recent average is 8,375 credits.

 

The cluster at the end of 2020 is made up of:

2 x Pi4 (2GB) as support nodes

3 x Pi4 (8GB) as compute nodes

6 x Pi3 as compute nodes

Plans are underway to swap all of the Pi3's out, and are being held up by the 3D printing studio. The intention is to get to 12 x Pi4 compute nodes. All of the Pi3s have transitioned to running a 64 bit operating system and the optimized Einstein app.

The Pi4 compute nodes also do Rosetta@home in a 50/50 resource split. Rosetta is out of work at the moment so they are only running Einstein.

6th of December

The cluster continues to operated in a reduce capacity. This is due to having four of the Pi3's and a Pi^4 case still off at the 3D printing place. I need to chase them up. They were in the process of moving from the inner-city to the lower north shore so I expected some delay on getting a modified case design.


Switching Pi3's to 64 bit
Meanwhile there are still 3 x Pi4 (8GB) running a mix of Einstein and Rosetta work and there were 6 x Pi3 running Einstein. I say were because I am switching the Pi3's to Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit. I had one converted and its been running for almost 4 weeks. I converted another two this morning. Only 3 more to go...


Experiments with Ansible
I had a bit of a play with Ansible after seeing Jeff Geerlings videos on Ansible 101. Things didn't quite work out as expected because I don't use password-less ssh. I'll have another try later. One issue I have is you can't use a Windows machine to manage the cluster (with Ansible) so I have to use another Pi or Linux machine as the Ansible host.


Raspberry Pi news
The Raspberry Pi foundation released a fan for the official Pi4 case. It sits inside the case and is claimed to get the temps down to 66 degrees.

There was a Debian point release combined with the traditional end of year Raspberry Pi OS release. You can download the latest updates using apt. Unfortunately the SD card image on their website has only been updated for armhf (32 bit) at the moment.