23rd of October

Marks Rpi Cluster continues to run 24/7. The cluster has 19.4M credits accumulated for Einstein@home and has a RAC (Recent Average Credit) of 40k. If output continues at the current pace it should hit 20M credits in a bit over a fortnight.

I would like to make the cluster a bit more resilient by duplicating a couple of the support nodes. However I can't seem to find the Pi4 2GB model for sale unless I resort to the overpriced ones on eBay. They make approximately 500k units a month according to Eben Upton but they still seem impossible to find. Their advice was to keep checking rpilocator.com to see where stock is available.

9th of October

Marks Rpi Cluster continues to run 24/7. As mentioned in previous posts its concentrating on running Einstein@home BRP4 work. That is 24 Raspberry Pi4's looking through data captured from the Arecibo radio telescope (before its demise), searching for Binary Radio Pulsars.

Most of the compute nodes have managed to get their RAC (Recent Average Credit) up to 1600, with a couple even getting up to 1700.

I was asked last week what the up-time on the compute nodes was. These days it is usually one to two weeks due to security fixes and other updates, but I have gone for a few months before rebooting them.


Universe@home
I had a brief look at running Universe@home on Marks Rpi Cluster. They are an astronomy project currently doing analysis on Black Holes.

Their Raspberry Pi app is for the ARMv6 (original Raspberry Pi). The Pi2 was ARMv7 and the Pi3 and Pi4 are both ARMv8. In other words the app is not able to take advantage of the newer Pis hardware. Its also a 32 bit app so won't take advantage of a 64 bit operating system and one has to install support libraries to run them under Raspberry Pi OS 64 bit.

Needless to say I gave up on the idea of running it.