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Pointless Technology: August 2016:
You can read the full blog topic here:
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Windows Updates and svchost.exe the CPU hogger: June 2016:
You can read the full blog topic here:
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You can read my full blog post here:
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Another burnt out socket: April 2016:
Here's one I burnt out in 2011, when I used only half of the socket:
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The clocks went forward this morning, “British Summertime” begins, and with this my computers go off, you know (or may not), all the ones I use for participating in SETI@home and keeping my home warm through the colder months. Or that was the plan, because I actually started switching them off a week or so ago when I felt the weather warming up. The weather is at that in between and changeable phase where I can never guess how warm the day will be… or how many computers I ‘need’ to leave on. I wanted to see what progress I would make in the project – it would take me another few months to gain a place in the UK standings; that I will have to leave until the end of the year.
Oh, and I missed Earth Hour (again), you know, where
we switch off all electrical things for an hour. You can read the full blog post
here: |
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Since my last SETI@home update at the end of January, my Recent Average Credit (RAC) peaked as predicted. However, instead of letting things be I finally gave in and bought a couple of extra graphics cards to add to my arsenal for a short while. I had a spare computer knocking around and an additional PSU to take up the slack. The two Nvidia 760s arrived next day after my ebay Offer had been instantly accepted and I first tested them individually before setting them to work proper. I was pretty chuffed. Since then I’ve been watching my RAC climb each day, wondering where and when things would stop.
The downside to having additional graphics cards crunching is the additional electricity being consumed, but I wanted to make a last-ditch attempt to make some good headway before I power everything down when British Summer Time begins at the end of March. Since last year I had decided to only run all my computers for SETI@home during the coolest months of the year, effectively using them as heaters. This they have done well, providing me with enough warmth during most weeks to avoid me feeling the need to put my oil-fueled central heating on – it hasn’t been a particularly cold winter here though, hardly ever dropping to freezing outside. My SETI progress hasn’t been as good as I had hoped though. I was keen to overtake someone who no longer contributes (‘Gone’) but has remained ahead of me in the UK standings for a long while due to their previous efforts, but with some downtime, significantly when January saw the arrival of the setiathome v.8 app, my attempts were thwarted it seemed. I calculate it would take me a further 3.5 months, and I’m only allowing myself one more… oh well, when I power things back up next winter I will continue my chase then.
My current RAC puts me at 4th in the UK, 8th in team GPUUG, and 62nd in the world.
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More recently I’ve had a fan failure in a PSU which caused it to overheat and shut down, preventing further damage but still requiring an RMA nonetheless. The first strange thing was the Corsair PSU was only a couple of months old. I contacted Scan to arrange a return and frustratingly heard nothing back, so then contacted Corsair directly and promptly received the instructions to return the part; the second strange thing being that it turns out Corsair’s UK returns centre is shared with Scan. Perhaps the PSU just needs the fan swapping out but even to save myself the cost of the return I wasn’t prepared to void the warranty by lifting the cover to try – for a PSU that’s out of warranty I would have fitted another fan but one shouldn’t take poking about inside a PSU too lightly as there can be dangerous electricity lurking within. Luckily I had a spare PSU to hand so I could keep all my rigs running. January saw the arrival of the setiathome v.8 app which “gives us the ability to process data from multiple sources, including the Green Bank Telescope. That means we’ll be ready for data from Breakthrough Listen when it’s available.” I suppose I could read up a little more on this really understand what it means! Sadly there was no GPU work for a while until that point so it was either a case of switching everything off or running only CPU work. I opted for the latter; I could have taken the opportunity to save some electricity but it’s winter here and my house was getting chilly – I kept all rigs on and optimised them to run SETI@home on all CPU cores (the best practice is to limit the number of CPU cores crunching work units in order to feed the GPUs). The idea being that my RAC (Recent Average Credit) wouldn’t drop off quite so dramatically/and I’d have a little head start against those who are normally optimised for GPU crunching also and who stopped crunching for the time being. As soon as v.8 work started flowing in for the GPUs I switched back to GPU crunching and then as soon as Lunactics v0.44 became available to better push my hardware I installed that also. My tactics paid off and I sat quietly with a smug look on my face as I rose from 20th in team GPUUG to 15th+. I’ve also had the run on a few fellow participants in the UK where my RAC dropped significantly while there was no GPU work, but I’m currently in 5th, based on weekly credit whereas realistically I’m in 8th. Things will settle down once my performance peaks of course – I expect this to occur in a few weeks.
You can read the full topic here: |
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