Marks Rpi Cluster is on and off. As I type this its on. We had a few weeks of hot weather where I had the Pi's idle and when it gets a bit cooler have them going again.
I have reduced the cache on all of the Pi's so that I can finish off what work they have quickly. With the reduced cache they will fetch additional work only when they are about to complete the 4 tasks they have at the time.
In other news I got a few of these:
Marks Rpi Cluster continues to run 24/7. The last few weeks saw two updates that interrupted processing. When applying updates that require a reboot I finish off the onboard work, apply updates and reboot. The Pi4's can take up to 3 and a half hours to finish off their work.
As usual we're running Einstein BRP4 work after I let the Pi5's have a week running Asteroids work. The Asteroids app seems to run fairly quick on the Pi5 relative to the Pi4's.
The cluster consists of:
4 x Pi5 (4GB) as compute nodes
1 x Pi5 (4GB) as support node
24 x Pi4 (8GB) as compute nodes
1 x Pi4 (2GB) as support node
I will likely swap out the Pi4 support node with a Pi5. It doesn't need the extra processing power as its a time server with a GPS, but all the Pi's hit it regularly so there is a fair bit of network traffic.
Marks Rpi Cluster continues to run 24/7. As usual it is concentrating on the Einstein@home BOINC project running their BRP4 work units (Binary Radio Pulsar search #4). The Pi5's have managed to get their RAC (recent average credit) up to 1800 while the Pi4's are in the 1200's, which suggests the Pi5 is around 1/3rd faster than a Pi4.
Einstein had a scheduled outage last week where they were rearranging some back-end servers, so I increased the cache on all of them so they keep more work ready to start than usual. I also allow them to run another project if they can't get any work from Einstein. I didn't notice anything unusual when checking on them in the evening and there were no work units from the back-up project.
I noticed a news article on Phoronix and Geoff Geerling also made a video around a patch that can improve the Raspberry Pi5's speed by using NUMA emulation mode. The Linux kernel patch was rejected by the kernel developers in its current form so it needs to be reworked but that doesn't stop the Raspberry Pi foundation from applying it to their version of the kernel. There was also another patch that can reduce idle power consumption.
Phoronix article for idle power: Suspend-To-Idle-Raspberry-Pi
Phoronix article for NUMA emulation: ARM64-NUMA-Emulation-RPi5
You can see Geoff's YouTube video HERE.
The Pi case arrived and has now been assembled.
There isn't much room from one Pi to the layer above and the Pi's were reporting temps in the 60's (degrees C). I added a fan on the side to help move the warm air from each layer which has reduced the temperature to the mid to high 50 degrees.
I still need to get short network cables to help tidy things up.
The Pi5's have now passed the RAC (Recent Average Credit) that the Pi4's were getting so they are being more productive.
