Hi,

Is there anyone here who can help with issues on a pi 3B running boinc seti?

Problems are.....

1. Sometimes I get 'error' or 'invalid' and don't know why.

2. Sometimes the pi just stops processing. No activity from the SSD and unable to ping or ssh into it. This might take days or weeks to happen, but then it requires a power cycle to get it going again.

I have a big heatsink and fan on the pi with a quality 5V6A psu connecting directly to the gpio pins. The extra current is for future upgrade to add a battery backup and this will then be able to charge and run at the same time.

I boot and run from a Kingston SSD connected via USB.

Thanks for any help or suggestions.

I recommend you subscribe to this thread: https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=83660

Which has "several" pi enthusiasts for the question(s) you have raised.

I have no other ideas. But sometimes reducing the cores devoted to processing makes a difference. And sometimes you need to play with the cpu voltage.

Tom

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A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association).

Hi,

Is there anyone here who can help with issues on a pi 3B running boinc seti?

Problems are.....

1. Sometimes I get 'error' or 'invalid' and don't know why.

2. Sometimes the pi just stops processing. No activity from the SSD and unable to ping or ssh into it. This might take days or weeks to happen, but then it requires a power cycle to get it going again.

I have a big heatsink and fan on the pi with a quality 5V6A psu connecting directly to the gpio pins. The extra current is for future upgrade to add a battery backup and this will then be able to charge and run at the same time.

I boot and run from a Kingston SSD connected via USB.

Thanks for any help or suggestions.

Hi Ed,

I used a Kingston SSD on one of my Pis some time ago and it didn't seem to be as efficient as running the Pi from an MicroSD card. It took too long just to boot for one thing. The Pi quit responding to the SSD altogether, after several weeks, so I switched back to the MicroSD card and have had no problems since. As Tom mentioned we have a thread running just for the Pi and other single board computers like the Pi.

Have a great day! :)

Siran

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CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr - L L & P _\\//
Winders 11 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

Thanks for the responses.

I moved from sd to ssd due to issues and sd was much worse in my experience.

I will look at the thread advised and see what I can learn there.

Your crunch times are all over the place. Normally a sign of overcommittment by the cpu. Either you are trying run all cores on tasks or the SSD is causing unnecessary cpu cycles for access compared to the SD card slowing down processing. Your invalid is caused too high a clock on either memory or cpu.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

In 'top' I see all 4 cores running seti - is this wrong?

Everything was set to 'auto' when I set this up. If it needs to change then how do I do that?

Clock speeds should be default. I see nothing in config.txt that is changing clock speeds. Again, do I need to do something here and if so what please?

In 'top' I see all 4 cores running seti - is this wrong?

Everything was set to 'auto' when I set this up. If it needs to change then how do I do that?

Clock speeds should be default. I see nothing in config.txt that is changing clock speeds. Again, do I need to do something here and if so what please?

Hi Ed,

My 3 Pis are only doing 2 tasks each. This is from default when I first attached them to SETI. You may want to get help in the other Pi thread. There are many Pi users there. And, there's a boat load of information already there.

Have a great day! :)

Siran

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CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr - L L & P _\\//
Winders 11 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

I have a big heatsink and fan on the pi with a quality 5V6A psu connecting directly to the gpio pins. The extra current is for future upgrade to add a battery backup and this will then be able to charge and run at the same time..

Normally you would power the Pi via the micro USB port. That gives the added protection of a poly fuse. Powering it via the GPIO pins is not recommended and 6 amps is way more than it would like. The recommended power supplies are only 2.5A and that is to allow for USB devices, they used to use 2A power supplies.

I have a couple of Pi's using a PiDrive 24/7 without any issues, so not sure if your SSD is part of the problem or not. I boot off the SD with them and then the rest runs off the PiDrive. That is the root partition is on the PiDrive and the SD card is only read when it boots up - no writes.

My crunching Pis use SD cards. The latest Raspbian had some SD card fix in it, so that might also effect your reliability. All are powered via the micro USB port (most are using USB chargers), but the two with PiDrives have the official 2.5A power supply.

I've suggest taking it back to a standard SD card setup using the micro USB for power and see if that runs reliably. You can then introduce the SSD into the equation and see if that effects it before going back to the GPIO power setup.

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BOINC blog

There is also a good amount of information over at Einstein's Pi thread https://einsteinathome.org/content/parallella-raspberry-pi-fpga-all-stuff and some very knowledgeable people there too.

Advice, if you overclocked it, put it back to stock. If you played with the voltage, put it back to stock.

As to your power supply, I don't know how well regulated it is and that might be an issue. Use an official supply.

Other possible issues are bad line power, use a UPS and surge suppressors, or static electric discharges, use a grounded chair mat.

Finally, you just might have a bad chip.

I have a few 3b and many 3b+'s running setiathome.


check/fault finding list

if overclocked revert back to normal.
else if you are not overclocked, then are you actively cooling? I found a small cheap 2"*2" fan is enough to cool the cpu for seti, that is with at least a cpu heat sink.
if the prior conditions are met, then look at power, you need a 5v 2.4 amp minimum power supply, I run 2.5a to 3a personally.
if not power then SD card. I run cheap Sandisk, transend, or samsung.
if still problems after all these condition, I would conclude a bad board.

raspberry pi' are very robust little SBC's as others have stated there are many RPI in seti

How are my 'crunch' times now?

Still not up to par for the task type and a stock RPib3. I am doing the BLC33 tasks in ten hours and you are doing the tasks in 12 hours.
Are you still running all four cores? I only run on 3 cores doing two tasks for Seti and one for Einstein.
That probably explains the time difference.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Keith,

Thanks for the response - I reduced boinc/seti to 3 cores a week ago (or thereabouts).

I am not limiting the work units and see between 4-9 units being processed at any given time. Should I do something about that?

Is there a recommended config setting anywhere here I can use as a guide setting this up to run without errors or crashes?

If you are only running 3 of 4 cores and still running longer than normal, the reason must be low clocks due to overheating. Do you have any heat sinks or fans on the cpu and chips on the board? If you are not oveclocking and running stock your core clock speed should be:

1400 Mhz / 51 C

You can run a simple bash script file on your Pi with either the builtin:

vcgencmd measure_temp

or

watch -n 1 cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq

or this bash script cpu_temp_clocks.sh that does both as in my first output.

#!/bin/bash
cpu_freq=/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq
cpu_temp=/sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp
if [ -e $cpu_freq ] ; then
if [ -e $cpu_temp ] ; then
while [ true ] ; do
clk=$(cat $cpu_freq)
cpu=$(cat $cpu_temp)
echo -ne $(($clk/1000))" Mhz / "$(($cpu/1000))" C \r" 
sleep 5
done
fi
fi

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

I am not limiting the work units and see between 4-9 units being processed at any given time. Should I do something about that?

That seems reasonable for a work cache for the speed and performance of these SBC computers. I have a 0.1 day work cache setting set in Computing preferences for the Home venue which all my SBC computers are located. That gives me about 4 or 5 tasks in the Seti cpu and Einstein cpu caches and about 14 tasks in the Einstein gpu cache. My turnaround time for Seti tasks is only half a day. So very reasonable.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Thanks for the info.

My pi is 1200MHz @ +55C - so in the ball park.

I can't see how to post photos of the heatsink and fan combo on the pi, but it is the same as I use on many pi2/3 setups.

As a side note, I have about 15 pi machines running different things. I have no problems with pi1, pizero, pi2, pi3B+. But I do get issues with all pi3B. Weird!

Sadly these boards don't directly support photos.
What we have to do is upload them to one of the image sharing sites, then put the links into a message enclosing the link with [ img ] and [ /img ] (without the extra spaces.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?