Saturday, July 13, 2024

14th of July

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.