31st of January

After a bit of break Marks Rpi Cluster is back online. I had building and painting happening so they were powered down while this took place. The cluster is busy again with Einstein and Rosetta work.

I powered up the farm starting with the two support nodes. They came up but for some reason couldn't be found on the network. I tracked this down to an issue with the power adapter for the switch that they were connected to. Once fixed I brought up the remaining Pi4's without any further incidents.

The following day I tried to get the Pi3's going and none of them would work. I had to plug a screen and keyboard into one to see what was happening. It seems all 6 of them had corrupt SD cards. I ended up having to re-image them and reinstall each one which took a little time. They're now running Einstein work.

I've ordered another Pi4 (2GB) to take over the time keeping role. At the moment the storage server Pi also has a GPS plugged in to provide time. I will move it over to this dedicated Pi, once it arrives. GPS's send strings of data every second that is interpreted and passed onto the NTP client. Its a constant CPU load (around 2-5% on a Pi4).

I will be chasing up the 3D printing studio regarding the revised Pi case tomorrow to see if I can get them sorted out. The last contact I had was on the 13th of January saying they would have the design finalised in a week. Its now been a fortnight. 

10th of January

 I bought a couple of these

They call these the Heatsink Case. These cases are basically 2 pieces of anodised aluminium, some thermal pads and 4 screws. They are also available in a gold colour. With an ambient temperature of 25 degrees C they hover around 67 degrees when crunching so they help but are not as good as a fan case.

Having done the cases, both of these Pi4 4GB have been added to the cluster until the Pi^4 cases are sorted out. That brings Marks Rpi Cluster up to:

3 x Pi4 8GB
2 x Pi4 4GB
6 x Pi3
2 x Pi4 2GB support nodes

Kernel update
In other news the Raspberry Pi Foundation upgraded the kernel from 5.4 to 5.10 which has only recently been released. Debian haven't even got their 5.10 kernel out of testing yet.

The Rosetta app doesn't like being stopped and started which means I have to run each machine down so it has no work on board before upgrading it.

Progress as of 28 December 2020

This is where Marks Rpi Cluster is at as of the 28th of December for Einstein@home. Total credit is 9,259,261 and recent average is 8,375 credits.

 

The cluster at the end of 2020 is made up of:

2 x Pi4 (2GB) as support nodes

3 x Pi4 (8GB) as compute nodes

6 x Pi3 as compute nodes

Plans are underway to swap all of the Pi3's out, and are being held up by the 3D printing studio. The intention is to get to 12 x Pi4 compute nodes. All of the Pi3s have transitioned to running a 64 bit operating system and the optimized Einstein app.

The Pi4 compute nodes also do Rosetta@home in a 50/50 resource split. Rosetta is out of work at the moment so they are only running Einstein.

6th of December

The cluster continues to operated in a reduce capacity. This is due to having four of the Pi3's and a Pi^4 case still off at the 3D printing place. I need to chase them up. They were in the process of moving from the inner-city to the lower north shore so I expected some delay on getting a modified case design.


Switching Pi3's to 64 bit
Meanwhile there are still 3 x Pi4 (8GB) running a mix of Einstein and Rosetta work and there were 6 x Pi3 running Einstein. I say were because I am switching the Pi3's to Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit. I had one converted and its been running for almost 4 weeks. I converted another two this morning. Only 3 more to go...


Experiments with Ansible
I had a bit of a play with Ansible after seeing Jeff Geerlings videos on Ansible 101. Things didn't quite work out as expected because I don't use password-less ssh. I'll have another try later. One issue I have is you can't use a Windows machine to manage the cluster (with Ansible) so I have to use another Pi or Linux machine as the Ansible host.


Raspberry Pi news
The Raspberry Pi foundation released a fan for the official Pi4 case. It sits inside the case and is claimed to get the temps down to 66 degrees.

There was a Debian point release combined with the traditional end of year Raspberry Pi OS release. You can download the latest updates using apt. Unfortunately the SD card image on their website has only been updated for armhf (32 bit) at the moment.