Still running

The farm is still running and still doing Einstein BRP4 work. I tried the Asteroids@home work but they have a problem with their app missing some optimizations that make them take longer than before and they make the Pi's run hotter. The farm consists of:

2 x Pi5 (4GB) as support nodes.
4 x Pi5 (4GB) as compute nodes.
24 x Pi4 (8GB) as compute nodes.

We're in winter at the moment in Sydney, Australia so the farm is running 24/7 at the moment. The farm is currently on 36,094,879 credits with a recent average of 42,759 credits.

  

As mentioned in previous posts I would like to update the farm to all Pi5 nodes, however the Edge Cluster that I use for the Pi4's doesn't support them. There has been no news from BitScope regarding Pi5 support.

I wouldn't be surprised if there is a Pi6 coming soon as the Raspberry Pi foundation have updated the Compute module 5, Pi500 and Pi5 to all use the BCM2712 as well as releasing a Pi5 with 16GB of memory.

With the fake numa node settings it would appear recent Rpi OS updates have been automatically enabling it. While I tried it on the Pi4's I didn't notice any advantage for them, but it certainly make a difference with the Pi5's.

Updates and remove some firmware

The weather cooled off a bit and its been raining which also helps bring the temperatures down so I had the Pi5's running and fired up half of the Pi4's.

The Pi4's having been off for quite a while needed updating which took a while due to the number of  packages and there was a kernel update.

It seems that even with the Raspberry Pi Lite image they have started bundling GPU firmware. If you use any of these you are probably running the desktop version of Raspberry Pi OS, not the Lite version. I am guessing this is because Jeff Geerling has been working to on getting GPU's running with the Raspberry Pi5.

None of my Pis have a GPU so I remove those packages. You can check on the Debian website what driver is in each package. In a terminal or ssh session type:

sudo apt purge firmware-intel-graphics firmware-marvell-prestera firmware-nvidia-graphics firmware-mediatek firmware-intel-misc firmware-libertas firmware-misc-nonfree

sudo apt-mark hold firmware-intel-graphics firmware-marvell-prestera firmware-nvidia-graphics firmware-mediatek firmware-intel-misc firmware-libertas firmware-misc-nonfree

sudo apt autoremove

While I was at it I also added the fake numa-node changes to improve memory timing. You can find the instructions on the Raspberry Pi forums and it only works for the Pi4 or Pi5. The Pi5's seems to be around 18% faster when running the Einstein BRP4 app. At a rough guess 5% for the Pi4, so not as big an improvement but that is from a small sample.