Sadly, I had to ABORT this workunit. There were too many errors to let it continue on my Raspberry Pi Zero! .. On to more workunits! (one at a time!)

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/workunit.php?wuid=2130636513

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Expanding the edge of Science.

My Pi B is also getting stuck like this. If I suspend, then resume the task, it runs for a few hours, then sticks again.

Nothing interesting in the BOINC logs, but if I leave a shell going, I can see this:

Message from syslogd@raspberrypi at May  3 23:48:34 ...
 kernel:[429716.064162] Internal error: Oops - undefined instruction: 0 [#6] ARM

Message from syslogd@raspberrypi at May  3 23:48:34 ...
 kernel:[429716.156469] Process setiathome_8.02 (pid: 4853, stack limit = 0xdc12e188)

Message from syslogd@raspberrypi at May  3 23:48:34 ...
 kernel:[429716.163338] Stack: (0xdc12fe78 to 0xdc130000)

Message from syslogd@raspberrypi at May  3 23:48:34 ...
 kernel:[429716.167783] fe60:                                                       dc12fe90 dc12e000

Message from syslogd@raspberrypi at May  3 23:48:34 ...
 kernel:[429716.176048] fe80: dc12feac dc12fe90 c000a6f0 c000a55c 00000000 be820368 00000000 daf7e3c8

Message from syslogd@raspberrypi at May  3 23:48:34 ...
 kernel:[429716.184316] fea0: dc12fec4 dc12feb0 c0012d20 c000a6c8 dc12ffb0 dc12fec8 dc12ff8c dc12fec8

Message from syslogd@raspberrypi at May  3 23:48:34 ...
 kernel:[429716.192581] fec0: c0013150 c0012bac 000d5378 14000000 0021b940 00000000 00000000 0000000e

Message from syslogd@raspberrypi at May  3 23:48:34 ...
 kernel:[429716.200845] fee0: 00000000 00000080 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000003 dc12ff08

Message from syslogd@raspberrypi at May  3 23:48:34 ...
 kernel:[429716.209110] ff00: c005b474 c005d5e0 00000078 0000000e 00000011 c07d6e1c 00000001 c07d6e1c

Message from syslogd@raspberrypi at May  3 23:48:34 ...
 kernel:[429716.217374] ff20: c081b9b8 00000000 00000000 c005dc4c dc12ff4c dc12ff40 c005dc4c c005a9b8

Message from syslogd@raspberrypi at May  3 23:48:34 ...
 kernel:[429716.225638] ff40: dc12ff5c dc12ff50 c001ff64 c002741c dc12ff74 dc12ff60 c002741c 0000000e

Message from syslogd@raspberrypi at May  3 23:48:34 ...
 kernel:[429716.233903] ff60: c005df80 00000001 dc12e000 00000000 dc12ffb0 00000000 dc12e000 002efe08

Message from syslogd@raspberrypi at May  3 23:48:34 ...
 kernel:[429716.242168] ff80: dc12ffac dc12ff90 c0013458 c0012e8c 0002b410 80000010 f200b200 00c5387d

Message from syslogd@raspberrypi at May  3 23:48:34 ...
 kernel:[429716.250433] ffa0: 00000000 dc12ffb0 c000f7e4 c001339c 00f32e20 be8206cc ffffffdc 00f32f00

Message from syslogd@raspberrypi at May  3 23:48:34 ...
 kernel:[429716.258701] ffc0: 00f32e00 0000002c 00f75590 00000040 002f1f60 002eff31 002efe08 002e8958

Message from syslogd@raspberrypi at May  3 23:48:34 ...
 kernel:[429716.266966] ffe0: 00f75624 be820658 0002b3b8 0002b410 80000010 ffffffff 61657274 3072656d

Message from syslogd@raspberrypi at May  3 23:48:34 ...
 kernel:[429716.317656] Code: e12fff1e e1a0200d e1a0e009 eafffebe (eca00b20)

Didn't have this problem on Beta.

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My Pi B is also getting stuck like this. If I suspend, then resume the task, it runs for a few hours, then sticks again.

Ditto, same symptoms here.

So for those who already have a Pi going - how's your average power consumption? What do you use to power it?

I'm considering picking up a couple Pi 3's and running them off the USB2 ports one of my computers has to give it a little boost for the power it's already using while crunching. I'm just not sure the USB2 bus will supply enough power to run one, or maybe two, of these Pi's simultaneously under a high load.

Also, does BOINC utilize the GPU on board? The spec sheet says it has a 24 GFLOP general purpose compute ability and I'd rather not have that go to waste.

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So for those who already have a Pi going - how's your average power consumption? What do you use to power it?

I'm considering picking up a couple Pi 3's and running them off the USB2 ports one of my computers has to give it a little boost for the power it's already using while crunching. I'm just not sure the USB2 bus will supply enough power to run one, or maybe two, of these Pi's simultaneously under a high load.

Also, does BOINC utilize the GPU on board? The spec sheet says it has a 24 GFLOP general purpose compute ability and I'd rather not have that go to waste.

I use a dual USB wall charger that's rated for 24 watts ... 2.4 amp each and have had no issues. Personally, I wouldn't want to use a computer's USB port .. if you burn out the port... then what? (A lot cheaper and easier to replace a wall charger than change out a USB port on a machine... right?)

With the cpu running at 100%, I find the temperature (on the Pi 3) can hit the wall, and the cpu will throttle back the cpu speed for self-protection... I suggest both a heat sink and a fan that push air across the board and you'll stay at top speed. (Anyone that says this is overkill, probably isn't running BOINC.)

You can use the command line ...

vcgencmd measure_clock arm && vcgencmd measure_temp

... to monitor the clock speed and temperature.

GPU: nope. Let's hope that's in the works. The Raspberry Pi only sets performance records for being the slowest.

I currently run two Raspberry Pi 2Bs, one Pi 3 and one Pi Zero. (The Pi Zero is single core, running Raspbian Lite ... no GUI... the others run the full GUI version of Raspbian.)

If you're shooting for fast accumulations of "credits" .. you would be better off with a hot graphics card with a large number of cores. The Raspberry Pi will probably disappoint in that regard. On the other hand, The Raspberry Pi is a pretty cool computer for the experimenter and inventor. There are lots of cool things that you can do with it.

Cheers!

// Brian

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Expanding the edge of Science.

My stack of 5 (1 Pi2B, 4 Pi3) use about 23 watts, so they average about 4.5 watts each (includes inefficiencies with my power supply). When I measured my Pi2 alone it would use about 3.3 watts.

I would also agree that it is a bad idea to run it off of your computer's USB port; both to protect your Pi and your computer. However, I do run all my Pis using a dedicated USB hub that is plugged into one of my UPSs. You just need to make sure any hub you buy can give consistent 5v and enough amps to the Pis (1.5-2 amps per Pi for headroom).

Like Brian said, it definitely is recommended to use heatsinks and a fan for dedicated crunching.

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Thanks Brian and Sidewinder.

I'm not too worried about the computer, since I was only going to run one Pi and it's basically a burner system at this point anyway. I was actually considering tapping straight off the PSU's 5v rail and making a dedicated set of charging/Pi ports, since there's obviously plenty of amperage there.

Sad that the onboard GPU isn't used yet! It seems like it's where most all of the power is. I'm not worried about upping my RAC, more just for spitting out a few WU's here and there.

I think I'll order up a Pi3 and a heatsink in the next week or so. I've got a couple server side projects that would be much more efficient to run on a Pi instead of my power-hungry Athlon, besides just for tinkering and/or BOINCing. For the sake of conversation: What distros do you use on your Pis?

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What distros do you use on your Pis?

Raspbian Jessie Lite (no gui).

Steps for installing BOINC on Raspbian:

sudo apt-get install boinc

cd /var/lib/boinc-client

sudo nano /etc/init.d/boinc-client (set ENABLED=1)

-- Restart client
sudo systemctl restart boinc-client

-- Add SETI@home:
boinccmd --lookup_account http://setiathome.berkeley.edu <your_email> <your_password>
boinccmd --project_attach http://setiathome.berkeley.edu <your_account_key>

-- Set the owner of the project folder to boinc:
sudo chown -R boinc:boinc projects/

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