Exodus (Dec 20 2011)

Hello, world. Here's another random, non-comprehensive status update regarding our servers, quite possibly the last one before the end of the year.

So what are we dealing with lately. Well, carolyn (the mysql server) seems to have some funky memory. Or maybe it's an overactive watchdog in the kernel. Hard to tell, but the warning messages we're getting aren't given us the warm fuzzies. Operations are more or less normal, so we're just keeping an eye on it for the moment (don't really want to do any surgery before the holidays). Meanwhile, it did have a standard issues CPU lock last week, requiring a hard reset and database recovery. However annoying (and it seems the modern day linux kernels are getting more and more prone to this sort of misbehavior) it's so far easy enough to recover from after hard power cycling the machine. We have to do this a lot on bruno (the upload/compute server) quite often, and oscar (the informix database server) the other day as well. Every time we eventually recover just fine.

Also mysql-wise, we seem to be having performance issues that defy easy understanding and explanation. Maybe this is memory related (hope not), but probably just due to some black-box mysql internal bookkeeping. During some testing/tweaking I turned off the daily stats dump scripts, and (oops) forgot to turn them back on. So there was a period of 5-6 days without stats dumps. Sorry about that.

Another thing we have to keep an eye on is server closet temperature. Seems like (without clear notification) we are already in "holiday energy curtailment" mode. With less people around, lab-wide environmental controls (which assist our server closet cooling) are ramped down to save energy. Makes sense, but that still means temperatures rise in our closet, which isn't happy-making. So far they only went up a degree or two on average. Just one more thing to worry about.

Onto brighter news. The gang over at the GPU Users Group has been incredibly helpful to us thus far. They recently donated a 45 JBOD drive array, and as of today 28 2TB and 6TB drives (for this array and/or data transport to/from Arecibo). We'll use this, along with more drives to come and another whole server, to upgrade various parts of our current server backend in the near future: science database server storage, upload server, download server, and main BOINC admin/compute server... They are still collecting donations over at their site (see our
donation page for a link to their paypal-based donation site) going towards this new hardware.

Happy holidays, safe travels, and all that. See you in the new year...

- 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

Thanks for the update Matt, and for all the efforts,

Claggy

+1

Thank you very much for the update. They are always appreciated.

And Happy Holidays, Bah Humbug, and all that too.

And Here's to all the best for our Setiathome community for the coming year. We hope to make a difference.

Tom


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Thanks for the update.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

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Thanks for the update Matt.

You and the rest of the crew have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Thanks for the update and the kind words for the GPU Group.

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the updates. Its always interesting to find out what is happening behind the scenes.

Question:
The project is asking for one or more 240Gb (or larger) SSD's. Whatever happened with the Intel X25's? They must have died from too many IOPS by now. What are the new ones likely to be used for?

Cheers,
MarkJ

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the updates. Its always interesting to find out what is happening behind the scenes.

Question:
The project is asking for one or more 240Gb (or larger) SSD's. Whatever happened with the Intel X25's? They must have died from too many IOPS by now. What are the new ones likely to be used for?

Cheers,
MarkJ

the project went down for a bit, someone must be lurking.

Umm, unless there's a good reason not to, could someone bring beta back up?
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Umm, unless there's a good reason not to, could someone bring beta back up?

oh oh oh

still waiting on Beta — dot, dot, dot...
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still waiting on Beta — dot, dot, dot...

I was hoping they'd left Beta down while they built v7 6.98 apps, But there's no sign of them yet, :-(

Claggy

me fall down...but me not want... HAPPY NEW YEAR !!!