Saturday, June 13, 2009

Future Plans ... "Junk Mountain"

I was looking for a serial port back-plane in my store-room during the week and it struck me that there are at least 3 PCs lying in there. Nothing really wrong with them, just old single core machines (Celerons/Athlons) that have been "decommissioned". There is a link on the BOINC website to a Linux distro (based on Ubuntu) from Dotsch_UX that allows one to set up a very basic OS with Boinc-client that is diskless, on a USB stick or else on a hard drive.
My plan is to investigate the most power efficient way of putting three mother boards in close proximity (no cases etc) with a single drive on a "server" to run the whole show. Running Milkyway's optimized science app, this should churn out a useful bit of credit for a relatively low KW/hr rating.

On the 9800GT front, the GPU seems to be behaving as long as I reboot the PC on a regular basis. Every second day seems to keep it happy.

I'm still getting a lot of client errors on QMC work units. Its not just from one machine, they are coming off 64-bit Linux, 32-bit Linux and 32-bit Windows. There is still nothing much being said on the QMC forums ... it can't just be me this time??

No comments:

Post a Comment