Fan casualty

Marks Rpi Cluster is back to running 24/7.

Fan Casualty
Last week I opened up the 2nd EC12 (Edge Cluster 12) so I could re-image the micro SD cards with Raspberry Pi OS 12. Yes I still use SD cards. While I had the back off I decided to give it a clean using a paint brush and air blower. I put it back together and got all the Pis going but there was a lot of fan noise when under load. After a bit of investigating I found one of the 80mm fans was not spinning.

There are two fans on the back of the EC12 to draw the warm air out of the case. The fans on the EC12 are only 10mm thick, normal fans are 20mm so I couldn't just swap it with a regular PC fan. I got in contact with Bitscope and went to their office this week and they gave me a couple of spare fans for free.

We're back to running on all 24 Pi4's now (each EC12 holds 12 Pis) and its running the Einstein@home BRP4 work.

Pi5s ordered
I've ordered a couple of additional EC12's with 24 x Pi5 8GB but Bitscope don't have firm dates for when they will get stock of the Pi5. They think it will be December 2023. It seems Raspberry Pi are limiting the current stock to hobbyists, so a limit of one per person. This gives Bitscope a bit of time to make changes to support the Pi5.

Raspberry Pi OS 12 released

Marks Rpi Cluster is running mostly overnight now due to hot weather. I don't use air conditioning for the farm so if it gets too hot any in-flight tasks get suspended until the temperature drops.

Raspberry Pi OS 12 released
The Raspberry Pi foundation released Raspberry Pi OS 12, based upon Debian 12 (aka Bookworm). There was only 1 surprise as I already run Debian Bookworm on my x64 based machines. The surprise was the latest version of raspi-config has removed the setting of GPU memory which was in earlier releases.

As I run my Pis headless (no screen or keyboard) I run the "lite" version which doesn't include a desktop environment and therefore I don't need to allocate much memory for the GPU. The Pi has to share its system memory with the GPU but if you don't use the GPU then you can reduce it to the minimum allowed which is 16MB, at least it was for the Pi3 and Pi4, I can't comment on the Pi5 as I haven't got any.

You can manually set the GPU memory by editing /boot/config.txt and at the end adding:
[all]
gpu_mem=16

Other changes are Debian now default to using the timesyncd service and ntp is no longer offered. You can use ntpsec or chrony as a replacement for ntp. In fact if you ask apt to install ntp it will install ntpsec instead. This is because Debian and other Linux distributions are moving to more recent implementations of the network time protocol.

I have updated one of my Edge Cluster 12's to the Bookworm release and they are working fine so far, That is 12 out of 24 compute nodes. I get a more up to date boinc client (7.20.5) as a result of switching to Bookworm. Rather than using my new micro SD cards I just re-imaged the existing cards. I figured I would keep the new micro SD cards for the Pi5's whenever I can get them. I am waiting on BitScope to offer a version of the Edge Cluster that works with the Pi5. BitScope indicated they were testing Pi5's but didn't say when a compatible version of the Edge Cluster would be available.

7th of October

Marks Rpi Cluster is back to running 24/7. After a week of hot weather things cooled down enough to restart the cluster. Hot weather returned and forced a 2nd shut down for a few days but we're back online now.

The Einstein@home scheduler seems to have an issue giving most of my Pi4's work with responses of "No work is available" but the server status page shows 7k available. After a bit of digging I decided to set the first four Pi4's to use the project supplied app so I have a control group. They have no problem getting work so it looks like their scheduler doesn't like giving work for the optimized app.

Pi5 Cluster?
Given the recent release of the Pi5 I will look at replacing the cluster. I have already been in contact with Bitscope who make the Edge Cluster. They have a prototype that works with the Pi5. I don't know if they are available for purchase yet. Nor am I sure if one can reuse some of the existing cluster and simply swap out the Pi4's for Pi5's or if they need further changes. I asked when it would be available but didn't get a response.

I'm a bit annoyed the Pi5 came out when it did as I purchased a Pi4 (2GB), Flirc case and power supply to load balance network traffic two days before they announced the Pi5.