Today's regular outage went pretty quick and smoothly. All the databases are fairly happy at the moment, and therefore maintenance was minimal.

During the outage we finally got the other recently donated server, paddym, into the closet. Here's a picture:



Here's the current inventory starting from the top of the left rack: a bunch of network switches (with the small CASPER server lost somewhere in there), oscar and carolyn (the two HP servers donated last year mounted next to each other on a sliding shelf), paddym, synergy, bruno (with all the blue lights), and thumper.

From the top of the right rack: anakin, georgem, the KVM for the closet, the 45-drive JBOD, one of Eric's hydrogen survey servers, and the whole gowron complex (the Snap Appliance and external drive arrays).

Not shown: various UPS's on the bottoms of these racks, and the rightmost rack in the closet, which contains most of the other servers commonly mentioned here (except for a few which still hang out in our satellite lab in room 329).

In the meantime Jeff and I have been mostly working on software. I actually got old SERENDIP IV RFI rejection code, which I haven't touched in about 12 years, to start reading data from a mysql database (instead of from flat files). This plumbing will come in handy when working on new data being collected at Green Bank. Jeff is continuing to optimize the NTPCkrs. We actually stumbled upon a major potential path of improvement yesterday. We shall see.

But speaking of science analysis, we also decided recently that the next priority is some major spring cleaning of our science data. We've been managing through the years, but there have been many events that caused the data to be non-standard. Like when we discovered some subset of our data was accidentally precessed twice, or had the frequencies reversed. These data aren't corrupted, by the way - the broken fields can be recalculated. We also have double entries of signals which may skew statistics. Sometimes the tables aren't fully accessible at once. Like the few times we ran out of extents in one table, and therefore split it into two, but never got around to merging it back into one.

We've been getting by with one software hack after another, but enough is enough. The next step is to tackle all these old problems and make the database one whole cohesive data set again. This shouldn't take too long, especially now that we have both paddym and georgem (and all the associated drives) to help out. Plus we can do most, if not all of this, in parallel with the normal daily public project operations and data analysis R&D. It's just a large set of nagging problems we'd like to get behind us already, and now we have the resources to do so.

Oh yeah I should also point out, on top of gathering funds and purchasing georgem and paddym, the GPU Users Group also came through and getting us a couple new spiffy, fast, and wonderfully quiet desktop machines to replace our current noisy/flakey ones that have been dropping like flies. Here's one of them in action (and yes it is actually hooked up to a perfectly good 19" Sun monitor!):



That's about it for technical news, though I should mention I'm revving up to head out again and go play rock star for a couple weeks. I'll be quickly passing through Argentina, Chile, and Brazil this time around. See you back here in a few.

- 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 pictures,

Claggy

Thanks for the details. I love this stuff!
-Dave

hehe whats about some Letter tray to put all their papers ? ^^


Nice news. awesome to see the new servers on their tracks :)

We'll work that into the budget ;)

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Executive Director GPU Users Group Inc. -
brad@gpuug.org

Many, many thanks for the update Matt, and for all the hard work.

It is Soooooo good to see them both powered up.

WOW I'm moved again.

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Happy Crunching,

Graham

Here's a picture:



- Matt

Needs more cowbell!:D

Love the memory plaques (only just noticed them).
Thanx again Graham and Seti Crew!

Have fun in South America, Matt!

Thanks for the picture Matt.

Have a good time on you trip. Time out of the office can be rewarding.

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SETI@home classic workunits 4,019
SETI@home classic CPU time 34,348 hours

Love the memory plaques (only just noticed them).
Thanx again Graham and Seti Crew!

Have fun in South America, Matt!

I hope the one on Georgem is not blocking the air intake.
and yes, i did download the photo and enlarge it :¬)

Thanks for the details. I love this stuff!
-Dave

Likewise.

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David
Sitting on my butt while others boldly go,
Waiting for a message from a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri.

That's about it for technical news, though I should mention I'm revving up to head out again and go play rock star for a couple weeks. I'll be quickly passing through Argentina, Chile, and Brazil this time around. See you back here in a few.

- Matt

Welcome to Brazil, Matt !!

What's up with downloads? The cricket graph shows a gradual decline from about 1600 yesterday. Downloads are failing (almost as soon as started) with an HTTP error... maybe some server needs a boot up the bum?

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.

Hello, from Albany, CA!...

;) Good to hear that the problems not only are noticeable in the Netherlands. ;)

Can someone please donate some wire management product for the rack :)

Can someone please donate some wire management product for the rack :)

I vote for management product for the wire.....

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