13th of November

Marks Rpi Cluster is still running. I have the cluster idle during the day and when it cools off overnight get them all going. We're still concentrating on Einstein@home. Needless to say its going to take longer to reach the 20M milestone. We're currently on 19.8M credits for Einstein.

This week saw another kernel and bootloader update so that lead to a round of updating and rebooting all the Pis. This was made a bit easier as the cluster is idle during the day so I don't need them to finish their current work.


Rock 5B
As mentioned in my previous post I had a look at the Radxa Rock 5B. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any Australian distributor for them so I would have to get it from an overseas site, which I have done in the past. Power supplies (ie with an Australian plug/240 volts) and warranty can be an issue when buying any computer parts from overseas.

I have only seen two cases mentioned for them, one aluminium and one plastic (3D print available on Thingiverse). There are no cluster case designs for them.

In regard to finding an operating system for it the Radxa website mentions Debian 10 (Buster) which was released in July 2019. Debian are currently on version 11 (Bullseye). I think this may be the Radxa website being out of date because I've seen a YouTube video showing it running Bullseye as well as the AmeriDroid website mentioning a few things not working under Bullseye as of July 2022. In addition to running Android or Debian there is also Armbian available for a range of SBC (Single Board Computers) including the Rock 5.

5th of November

Marks Rpi Cluster continues to run 24/7. After my last post we had a few hot days so I allowed the cluster to finished off its current work and idle. It now back to crunching again although today was hot as well with the room they are in reaching 30 degrees C.

With the break in crunching for a few days my RAC (Recent average credit) has dropped from from 40k to 29k. The cluster is up to 19.7M credits so at the current rate it might take 3 days to hit 20M credits, assuming I don't stop again due to the heat.

Seeing as I can't get a hold of any more Raspberry Pis I have been looking at the Raxda Rock 5B online. It is an ARM single board computer, almost double the size of the Rpi and comes in a Pico-ITX format. It has 4 Cortex A55 cores, 4 Cortex A76 cores, a Mali G610 GPU and ton of connectivity. Given its combination of cores its probably best to crunch on the A76 cores and leave the A55 cores to run less demanding work. They come in 4, 8 and 16GB memory sizes. Unfortunately it doesn't have the software support that the Pi has so a number of things don't work under Debian. It can also run Android.

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.