26th of February

We're still here. The cluster is working when the weather permits. Its been hot and for the last week its also been raining quite heavily.

Last week saw Rosetta out of work and Einstein ran out of BRP4 work. The Pi3s which only do BRP4 work were idle. The Pi4's filled up on Gamma Ray work which is quite demanding. I should really limit them to 2 at a time to try and speed them up. They typically take up to 27 hours if I run them on all 4 cores. I believe they are competing for memory access and the Pi4 doesn't have a particularly fast memory sub-system.

Update: 27 Feb 2022

Well that didn't work out. I setup 4 of the Pi4's to run a maximum of 2 of the Gamma Ray work units at a time. Unfortunately due to a bug in the BOINC client two of the machines decided to continuously request work until I noticed they had about 4 weeks worth accumulated. Einstein@home tasks have a 2 week deadline. I ended up aborting a bunch of work units and removing the change rather quickly.

12th of February

The Pi3's are currently idle. Einstein seems to have run out of BRP4 work units for the last week. The Pi4's were running Einstein Gamma Ray work but now Rosetta has work available they are all doing Rosetta.

Raspberry Pi OS 64 bit

I mentioned in my last post that there was now official support for the 64 bit Raspberry Pi OS.

There was some mention (from Jeff Geerling) that its really Debian so I downloaded the official build and installed that on a Pi4. While its closer to Debian it still has its customized kernel and boot loader. In fact it looks identical to the beta 64 bit version I have been running since 2020 with the updates applied.

The latest updates to the boot loader are to allow booting off an NVMe SSD, but that would only apply to the CM4 modules as they can be plugged into a carrier board which gives PCIe connectivity. The standard Pi3 and Pi4 don't have this connectivity but you can use a USB connected SSD on them.

5th of February

The cluster has been off due to the heat here in Sydney, Australia. It got to 33 degrees last week so everything that could be off was off. A cool change came through and now everything is running again, however its forecast to get hot again so I will likely have to power down the cluster again.

 

Raspberry Pi OS 64 bit officially released

The Raspberry Pi foundation has officially launched Raspberry Pi OS 64 bit. I've been running the beta test version since June 2020. I don't think there is any difference between the official version and the beta version if you have been applying updates as they become available (which I have). I will try installing the official version on a Pi4 to see if there is anything different.

The official announcement can be found HERE and the new 64 bit download page HERE.

There are still some issues to iron out (eg Chromium browser and some apps like Netflix not working) and of course you'll need a 64 bit capable Pi (Pi3, Pi4, Pi400 and Pi Zero 2).