12th of September

Marks Rpi Cluster continues to run, although it was idle yesterday and again today due to hot weather.

I took the opportunity to clean the Pi's and fans while they weren't doing any work. I have 40mm fans for each Pi, except the support nodes. While they do a good job of cooling it means the fans and Pi itself end up quite dusty. The fans also manage to get fluff on their blades. Its easily fixed by a paint brush and a can of air. Rather than using aerosol I have one called the "O2 Hurricane" which is good at blowing the dust out.

While I was doing that I found a spare Pi4 power supply so added another Pi4 8GB to the cluster. I also have a number of spare Pi3 power supplies. While I have spare 40mm fans I don't have any more 2 pin to 3 pin fan header cables. I only need these for the free-standing Pi's. If I use the Pi^4 case the fans are plugged into a couple of Y splitter cables and a USB charger.

The cluster is now up to:

9 x Pi4 (8GB) compute nodes
4 x Pi3 compute nodes
3 x Pi4 (2GB) support nodes

Its probably about time to start replacing the micro SD cards, particularly in the Pi4's as they run Rosetta@home which uses large files leading to them wearing out faster. I keep some spares on hand but not enough to do all of the Pi4's. I was hoping the Raspberry Pi foundation would update Raspberry Pi OS, then I could clean-install onto new SD cards but there hasn't been any mention of when we're likely to see it.