26th of June

Marks Rpi Cluster continues to run 24/7 in a slightly reduced capacity. That is the Pi4's are going 24/7 but the Pi3's are on during the weekend. The cluster is still running Einstein BRP4 work exclusively.

 

Blade Rack for Pi4

There is an updated version of the Blade Rack for Pi4's which I have ordered from BitScope. It follows a similar design to the one used for the Pi3's but each Pi gets a 30mm fan for cooling. Due to the extra fans I expect it will be a lot noisier that my existing Blade Rack, even though I ordered the desktop version of it.

I have 12 x Pi4 8GB, but 3 are still in boxes so this will allow me to move all of them into the one enclosure and get them all running 24/7. I need to repurpose the power supply from my existing Blade Rack so it will go off-line.

BitScope make larger versions of their Rack/Desktop that hold more Pi's but its rather difficult getting a hold of a Pi4 8GB at the moment.

12th of June

Marks Rpi Cluster is still running 24/7. At the moment I have the Pi4's running Einstein@home BRP4 work.

I have half-assembled the BitScope Blade Rack 20 (or should that be 10 seeing as its half assembled). The Blade Rack 20 is based upon Pi3's so its not the fastest. I had it running last weekend, and again this weekend. When running it can be doing 30 BRP4 work units at a time (60 if fully assembled). The Pi3's take around 4 hours and 40 minutes to finished off a BRP4 work unit. Due to the Pi3's lack of memory I can only run 3 work units at a time per Pi3.

Unfortunately all my Pi3 have copper heatsinks attached to the SoC (System on a Chip). I had to carefully lever a few heatsinks off with a flat-bladed screwdriver to get the 9th and 10th Pi's. The heatsinks are attached by self-adhesive thermal tape which despite their age is still very strong. In the process one Pi3 was working but then the network dropped out and came back 5 minutes later while in the middle of installing software on it. Assuming its faulty I replaced it with another Pi3.

The Blade Rack 20 has 4 fans for airflow, they are 30mm fans on the back of the case near the top and are used to extract the hot air from the case. They are also rather noisy. I have 2 installed at the moment. The plates that the Pis are sandwiched to have one Pi at the bottom and another Pi above that. The bottom Pis run around 65 degrees C but the top ones get to a rather toasty 75-80 degrees. The CPU will throttle if they get above 80 degrees.