Grids

fah-beta-mgr is a bash script which manages FAH beta binaries, so you don’t have to. It does (presently) assume that it’s running in a systemd-flavored Linux distro.

Here’s what it does:

• Maintains an A/B setup of fah-client binaries, which can be switched between
  • So if a new beta is problematic, a single command will restart FAH with the previous version
• Checks for new beta releases of fah-client
• If one exists, it is downloaded and becomes the ‘A’ fah-client binary
  • The previous ‘A’ binary becomes the rollback/‘B’ binary
  • Unless the ‘B’ binary was already active, in which case it is retained
• The script can self-update (upon request) over the net

Getting started

• Download the script here
• As root, run /path/to/fah-beta-mgr setup
  • This will move the script to /usr/local/bin and do other setup tasks
• Run fah-beta-mgr update to fetch the current beta FAH client and make it the active binary
  • Repeat this whenever you want to check for a new beta
• See fah-beta-mgr help for more options

Release notes

v0.5.0 (2025-12-11)

We believe in the power of science and a knowledge-based approach to life in general. So we’re proud to be a part of several community grid computing projects which work to solve open problems in medicine, environmental science, astrophysics, and mathematics.

Project stats

A WU is a “workunit”; a packet of computational tasks sent by the project and returned when complete.

2025-12-04 We’re back

Yeah, it’s not 2026 yet, but this is likely to be 2025’s only entry. I’ll keep it brief:

• We left WGC and all other BOINC projects in early 2024
• There was burnout around chasing the projects themselves, as they did and did not have work available
• We left FAH as well for roughly 18 months
• There was also burnout with maintaining the fleet and how much space it took up
• Returned to FAH in late October
• Only one fully dedicated machine now, and only three total. The other two spend the vast bulk of their cycles on FAH, but they do have other purposes
• Keeping it at three machines for the forseeable future
• All on Zen 5/AM5 for now. Upgrades are unlikely until Zen 6 is released, possibly late next year
• So until then, updates are likely to be sparse… but who knows?

Older updates

For older news, check out our 2022-2024 updates.

We want our hardware to keep doing good work after it’s cycled out of active use in our fleet. So we distribute rebuilt machines and/or components to people who can give them a good home.

2023-08-21 400 years of WCG

Things finally seem to be going more smoothly at WCG, and as a result we have now passed 400 years of CPU time for the project. We’ve also just passed one billion points (not very important), and are just shy of 1.5 million workunits done for the project (much more meaningful).

Also in the past week we’ve passed 10k WUs for FAH, and are approaching 2.5B points over there.

For five years my day job was managing a production, public Ceph cluster. I’m very fond of it and know how good it is at not losing data.

Now I want to start scanning my book collection. That will require a significant amount of durable onsite storage, so I’m turning to Ceph.

This document details the efforts to fold setup and management of the Ceph distributed filesystem into Homefarm.

2022-06-01 First steps

I always start a process with manual proving-out, then move to automation.

2021-11-04: More power

With temps continuing to drop outside, I’ve bumped the PPT on the 3950Xs to 80W, so they’re now sitting right at 60C with average clocks around 2.7GHz.

2021-10-20: node01 GPU upgrade

The GTX 1650 that I snagged arrived today and has been slotted into node01. That bumps its FAH EPPD from the range of 50-100k to 500k+.

Also, while node05’s 750 Ti is soldiering on, it’s become apparent that it should be upgraded as well. That’ll happen at some point after node04 gets taken care of.

2020-12-18: Second Century

Today marks 200 years of CPU time for World Community Grid, 340 calendar days after hitting the first century mark. Upgrades next year will let us do even more science in less time.

2020-08-25: Wrapping up Rosetta

With WCG’s OPN project in full swing, we are finishing up our existing work for Rosetta@Home, and then detaching our nodes for now. Rosetta is very heavy, and it’s also extremely popular so it’ll be fine while we put those cycles toward WCG’s projects.

This is the development diary for Greenhouse 2, the second iteration of my homebrew micro-rack.

2020-05-01 – Introduction

The original Greenhouse was a success, but several lessons were learned from it.

• Use of mITX boards minimized footprint, but drove up cost and reduced choice
• Over/under PSU design minimized horizontal footprint, but led to increased vertical spacing and more complex mounting
• Minimizing horizontal footprint wasn’t worth it
• Fully open design probably didn’t cool as effectively; pushing air where you want it isn’t as effective as forcing it to be pulled through where you need it
• Even moderately complex cutting and shaping of metal is a nightmare without proper tooling and space

And so the next iteration will be changed in several fundamental ways.

I’ve been working on adding support for the ARM architecture to Homefarm for a bit now. This week I decided to try to push through, and get that work done and tested.

Obviously you can’t test software designed to manage a farm of computers with just one machine, so I had to build myself a tiny ARM farm.

Building the cube

Here’s most of the raw materials: