14th of February

Marks Rpi Cluster is back and running after a 3 week weather-induced break. We're back to running Einstein@home BRP4 work on all the compute nodes. Understandably my recent average credit has taken quite a hit with the cluster being off for so long.

The cluster just powered up as normal and I went through each node and applied OS updates and rebooted them before resuming computing.

Einstein have a bunch of new BRP4 work units with "guppi" in the work unit name. We saw these previously at Seti@home. According to a message board post from 2016 it may stand for Greenbank Ultimate Pulsar Processing Instrument. As to when the observations were made we can't tell from their name.

I noticed the Asteroids@home project has come back online. Their server crashed over a year ago and had to get new hardware. It would appear they've been back since November 2022. The work using are used to compute the shape of asteroids using a light-curve method. They have released a ARMv8 app which the Pi's can run (they had a 32 bit app previously). They also have x86 and Cuda apps. I've attached a couple of Pi's to the project and have them computing now. Its looking they take 6 hours per work unit when running 4 at a time and they only use 9MB of memory.

7th of January 2023

After a week of being off the weather cooled down and Marks Rpi Cluster is running again.

During the week of down time I took the opportunity to replace the SD card on the Pi that kept dropping off the network. That meant taking the front panel off the Edge Cluster 12 (EC12) to get to it. While there I noticed it had a lot of dust around the two fans so I gave it a bit of clean with a paint brush and a blower. Having cleaned one EC12 I then had to clean the other one given they've both been running 24/7 since I got them.

I managed to get another Pi4 2GB to use as a proxy server. I'm trying to work out some way of load balancing the proxy servers. If worse comes to worse I can just have each EC12 using a different proxy server but that isn't ideal.

Last post for 2022

Marks Rpi Cluster is currently idle. Its been warm so not much has been done for the last week. I managed to get a days worth of crunching in before it got hot again.

I had one Pi4 that kept dropping out when I look at the cluster through BOINCTasks. I ended up clearing some space on its SD card, even though it said it was only using 8% of it. However when I did a fstrim -av it released over 3Gb of disk space. After a reboot it seems to be behaving again. Raspberry Pi OS has the fstrim service running by default, where it will run once a week to release disk space so I am not sure why this one Pi had an issue. I suspect it may be time to replace the SD card but that means shutting down all the nodes in the EC12, powering it off and then removing the front cover in order to get to it.

I plan to continuing crunching with the Pi cluster, weather permitting next year. I don't expect any major updates unless they release a new Pi. I would like to get the cluster using network booting rather than SD cards so some study and experimenting next year.

22nd of December

Marks Rpi Cluster continues to run. The last two weeks have been running 24/7, but tomorrow is forecast to be hot again so it will be back to running overnight when its cooler.  In addition to the 20M credits for Einstein@home three of the Pi4's, the first three put into service, have each got to 1M in host credits.

I'm still trying to get another Pi4 2GB to spread some of the network traffic. I had a email alert that they were in stock but by the time I got home and checked that night my usual supplier was out of stock again. These would have been some of the 100k or so Pi4's that Eben Upton talked about releasing to the hobbyist community. I saw an interview on the Explaining Computers YouTube channel with Eben where he didn't think they would be back to normal production until the 2nd half of 2023.