Came into the lab this morning and it was well over 70 degrees. This may seem nice on a winter day, but (a) we have fairly warm winters here in the Bay Area, and (b) the usual temperature in the lab is closer to 60 degrees - even in the summer. This isn't great from a human perspective - we wear jackets while sitting at our computers all year round. From a hardware perspective, the extra cold lab air assists in keeping our systems nice and cool. This is why I was immediately concerned about the suddenly warmer air. Turns out a fuse blew over the weekend, and it was already repaired before anything came close to melting. Still.. a little bit of panic this morning.

Despite the load on our backend servers being on the low side (averaged over the past 5 days or so) the assimilator queue was barely able to shrink. In fact, it's growing again due to the Monday bump. My guess (and others') which I already mentioned is that the new science database indexes, which add more random reads/writes during inserts, are to blame. We're doing more aggresive analysis and will try some "low hanging fruit" type solutions before too long. Not a major tragedy just yet, especially as workunit may be generally less noisy in the near future. The scheduling/upload servers are also on the brink of disaster - they have short but nevertheless frequent periods of dropping connections. They too would benefit from less noisy workunits. Or more/better hardware.

On that note, if you check out the slightly updated hardware donation page you'll see I added an item for a KVM-over-IP which would help us upgrade our server closet faster. We're maxed out in the console department. In fact, our one public web server has no keyboard/mouse/monitor attached to it. If it freaks out, we hope we can log in remotely and fix it. Any incredibly generous takers? Anybody have strong opinions about which make/model to obtain?

- Matt

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-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

Matt, we've had this conversation before, but it was before you declared 'thread bankruptcy', so I feel justified in raising it again.

There is a difference between 'noisy' workunits and 'shorty' workunits. It's good to hear that "workunits may be generally less noisy in the near future": presumably that's a combination of the improved radar blanking, and Joe's work in Beta for the next SETI science app (v6.00), which has finally found a cure for the false 30 pulse overflows which have been plaguing us for some time. Both of these are within SETI@home's sphere of influence, and it's good to know that improvements are on the way.

But the 'shorty' issue is different. 'Shorty' work is generated by the splitters from particular observing patterns at Arecibo, and the observing patterns are determined by the prime observers, not by SETI@home. Analysis I did following the major 'shorty storm' over Christmas suggested that the main 'shorty' generators were A2060, A2172, A2222, and A2174. Unless you're telling us that Arecibo (under its new paint job) is going to spend more time on extended deep-space point studies, and less time on survey and mapping work, I don't see how this part of the problem is going to go away.

heart, hear . . . Thanks for the Postin' Matt

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BOINC Wiki . . .

Science Status Page . . .

Came into the lab this morning and it was well over 70 degrees. This may seem nice on a winter day, but (a) we have fairly warm winters here in the Bay Area, and (b) the usual temperature in the lab is closer to 60 degrees - even in the summer. This isn't great from a human perspective - we wear jackets while sitting at our computers all year round. From a hardware perspective, the extra cold lab air assists in keeping our systems nice and cool. This is why I was immediately concerned about the suddenly warmer air. Turns out a fuse blew over the weekend, and it was already repaired before anything came close to melting. Still.. a little bit of panic this morning.

I work in a Comms background so know this scenario well. We have lost entire sites where one A/C unit has failed, leading to an eventual overload of the remainding workers. It can take days to recover from high temp failures too, so a close call for you!

Any chance of some pictures of the SETI servers sometime? I'd love to see how much kit makes the whole project tick along, although I have already got the impression that we are talking a small comms room / multiple racks?

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Came into the lab this morning and it was well over 70 degrees. This may seem nice on a winter day, but (a) we have fairly warm winters here in the Bay Area, and (b) the usual temperature in the lab is closer to 60 degrees - even in the summer. This isn't great from a human perspective - we wear jackets while sitting at our computers all year round. From a hardware perspective, the extra cold lab air assists in keeping our systems nice and cool. This is why I was immediately concerned about the suddenly warmer air. Turns out a fuse blew over the weekend, and it was already repaired before anything came close to melting. Still.. a little bit of panic this morning.

I work in a Comms background so know this scenario well. We have lost entire sites where one A/C unit has failed, leading to an eventual overload of the remainding workers. It can take days to recover from high temp failures too, so a close call for you!

Any chance of some pictures of the SETI servers sometime? I'd love to see how much kit makes the whole project tick along, although I have already got the impression that we are talking a small comms room / multiple racks?

To save Matt some time, you can find some images in the photo albums.

Came into the lab this morning and it was well over 70 degrees. This may seem nice on a winter day, but (a) we have fairly warm winters here in the Bay Area, and (b) the usual temperature in the lab is closer to 60 degrees - even in the summer. This isn't great from a human perspective - we wear jackets while sitting at our computers all year round. From a hardware perspective, the extra cold lab air assists in keeping our systems nice and cool. This is why I was immediately concerned about the suddenly warmer air. Turns out a fuse blew over the weekend, and it was already repaired before anything came close to melting. Still.. a little bit of panic this morning.

I work in a Comms background so know this scenario well. We have lost entire sites where one A/C unit has failed, leading to an eventual overload of the remainding workers. It can take days to recover from high temp failures too, so a close call for you!

Any chance of some pictures of the SETI servers sometime? I'd love to see how much kit makes the whole project tick along, although I have already got the impression that we are talking a small comms room / multiple racks?

To save Matt some time, you can find some images in the photo albums.

Mmm, unless new photos have been posted since the last time I looked, none of those servers shown are still in service! (last look 6/07)

We're not talking a designed comm room here, either - I've gathered the impression that the server room is a converted janitor closet!

[edit to add:]
Just took a look, and two of the current servers are shown: thumper and sidious; otherwise as above.

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Hello, from Albany, CA!...

The pics from Feb last year give the insight I was looking for. It is sort of how I imagined the project. Something that has developed & grown rather than been planned and laid out. I love the pictures showing cables stretched everywhere and the wires taped to the floor. Just the way a comms environment should be

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The pics from Feb last year give the insight I was looking for. It is sort of how I imagined the project. Something that has developed & grown rather than been planned and laid out. I love the pictures showing cables stretched everywhere and the wires taped to the floor. Just the way a comms environment should be

yeah, but... I think they've "cleaned up" the server closet (as Matt calls it...) since the photos in question were taken - something to do with not having a cascading series of failures (due to cables comin' loose) anytime they had to replace somethin'!

edit to my first post: that's thumper 1, (pre-breakdown) not the current thumper2, so only one current server is mentioned by name...

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Hello, from Albany, CA!...