Ah, the few days back at the lab between Xmas and New Year's... The university assumes nobody works at this time, so the buses aren't running, and so I have to drive into the lab. But of course they are still handing out parking tickets to people without regular parking permits (like myself, who rarely drive to the lab). So I gotta park elsewhere. Anyway...

Except for bruno (the upload server) having fits we were pretty much running smoothly all weekend. However bruno is also the main BOINC back-end administrative server for the SETI@home/Astropulse project, so when it has fits, everything kinda gums up. We couldn't get into bruno remotely (full process table?) so it waited until this morning when Jeff got in and rebooted it.

There was some cleanup after that, and we seemed out of the woods, but we're still having these mysql issues where the database enters these long periods of flushing pages to disk. We all agree that this is largely due to the increased demand (after all the long/short outages over the past two months, and perhaps a bout of short runners). Increased demand means more deltas, which in turn means more fragmented pages. We have these weekly outages to defragment the database, but given the load it's like 3-4 weeks of fragmentation within one week. We're thinking the outage tomorrow will largely fix this, but we're still tuning other stuff in the meantime. We already gave mysql access to more memory, but Bob predicted this wouldn't help, and he was right. He's trying other stuff now.

So the plan is to hang on have just the normal outage tomorrow, then be up (as best we can) the rest of the week and throughout the New Year's Eve weekend. Then in the new year we can really start squeezing these new servers and see what they got.

Oh yeah - I turned off the "resend lost results" for now to reduce the load on mysql. This is temporary.

- 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,

Claggy

Thanks for the news, Matt.

The kitties were wondering why the forums were being so spastic.

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"Time is simply the mechanism that keeps everything from happening all at once."

Uhhhh, you forgot to mention you turned off the tasks and the pendings pages too. No big deal but kinda caught me by surprise. Thanks for being there and doing all you guys do to keep us up and running and here's to a happy New Year for all of us.

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PROUD MEMBER OF Team Starfire World BOINC

Thanks for going in and kicking Bruno.

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Thanks Matt,

May your New Year Be Blessed and w/o "mysql" issues! (smile)

ront

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We turned those off after I wrote that note... for what that's worth.

Uhhhh, you forgot to mention you turned off the tasks and the pendings pages too. No big deal but kinda caught me by surprise.

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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

We turned those off after I wrote that note... for what that's worth.

Uhhhh, you forgot to mention you turned off the tasks and the pendings pages too. No big deal but kinda caught me by surprise.

Don't know if it is a big PITA to kill the cron job with the 3 day notice ...

Thanks for all the great work.

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To All @ SETI

Thank you for all your work and time you have put in over the last year.
Not to mention the interrupted weekends you have suffered.

A Happy New Year to you all.

and to all in SETI land.

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Bob Swift

What ever happened to the donated new server coming from "the GPU user group"? Did it fall through?

need to update the hosts names and descriptions on the server status page. i see ntpckr runs continually, so are the 3 day shutdowns a thing of the past?

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What ever happened to the donated new server coming from "the GPU user group"? Did it fall through?

seti is to snooty now and home built servers aren't good enough!!!

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It's still being assembled. They are checking everything to make sure it will work as expected. Shouldn't be too much longer now and then the guys at SETI will have to figure out just how they want to use it and get it set up and broke in.

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PROUD MEMBER OF Team Starfire World BOINC

What ever happened to the donated new server coming from "the GPU user group"? Did it fall through?

seti is to snooty now and home built servers aren't good enough!!!

Not true...
This latest donation is being actively pursued. Last I heard they were waiting on some backordered RAM for it.
Maybe that has been delivered by now.

The project was also delayed by the Seti staff having to devote so much time to getting the first 2 new servers configured and running.

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"Time is simply the mechanism that keeps everything from happening all at once."

What ever happened to the donated new server coming from "the GPU user group"? Did it fall through?

seti is to snooty now and home built servers aren't good enough!!!

Not true...
This latest donation is being actively pursued. Last I heard they were waiting on some backordered RAM for it.
Maybe that has been delivered by now.

The project was also delayed by the Seti staff having to devote so much time to getting the first 2 new servers configured and running.

I wouldn't doubt they are having RAM issues. I tried to order some ram for one of my systems only to hear back from Mushkin that they can't get memory chips and it is not just them.

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The server is fully certified operational and we will just be waiting on Matt at the lab to let us know when and where to ship it to.

Todd

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The server is fully certified operational and we will just be waiting on Matt at the lab to let us know when and where to ship it to.

Todd

You can ship it anytime to 7 Woodsi..... oh, you want to send it to Berkeley???

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PROUD MEMBER OF Team Starfire World BOINC

Good day,
Thought it best that I chime in since I am involved with the GPU Users Group server donation. I am pleased to announce that the RAM that was backordered for the server has been delivered, installed and certified to run a 24/7 duty.

Server RAM has been a significant challenge to get for the past 2 months and has caused headaches for many of us that build servers often - my company normally builds about 4-5 highend servers per week. Larger capacity modules (8 & 16GB) have been in very short supply throughout the world and delayed the donation.

These are the server specifications:
Intel SR2600UR Barebones Server
Intel SAS RAID Card with 8 Ports (SAS6/SATA6)
5 Seagate Constellation 1TB 6Gb/SAS Hard Drives 7200 RPM
48GB of Kingston DDR3-1066 Reg & ECC RAM (6-8GB Sticks)
Intel Slim-Line DVD-ROM Drive
Intel E5649 2.53Ghz Hex-Core CPU's (X2)
750 watt Dual Redundant Power Supplies
Front Panel Bezel to make it look pretty

Over the holiday I had the RAM testing (and the whole system for that matter) running Prime95 at 100% duty for a total of 4.5 days without any failures, lockups or other issues. I also ran the Intel Hardware Confidence Test for a total of 1 week with no issue so I am pleased to put the wraps on the box and ship it out to California in the coming days.

I would like to point out that the GPU Users Group, a very small group of dedicated crunchers has made this donation possible and was not simply a singular donation.

You can look for the new server to be called "Synergy" in the near future in the server status page.

Warm regards, Todd - Team GPU Users Group Admin and World RAC Leader
Happy New Year!

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Wonderful news, Todd!!
The kitties and myself thank you and your fellow teammates for another outstanding donation to the project.

Meow meow!!

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"Time is simply the mechanism that keeps everything from happening all at once."

Ah, the few days back at the lab between Xmas and New Year's... The university assumes nobody works at this time, so the buses aren't running, and so I have to drive into the lab. But of course they are still handing out parking tickets to people without regular parking permits (like myself, who rarely drive to the lab). So I gotta park elsewhere. Anyway...

(snip)

- Matt

I could be worse. The SETI servers could be located at Columbia in NYC.



Thanks for all your efforts. Hope you had a great Holiday and are looking forward to a very interesting New Year.

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