Firepear

Grid Computing @ Firepear

http://firepear.net/grid/grid/ 2024-03-12
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, and mathematics. Project stats A WU is a “workunit”; a packet of computational tasks sent by the project and returned when complete. World Community Grid Subproject CPU Time WUs Subproject status OpenPandemics 63 years+ 256_000+ Active Africa Rainfall Project 23 years+ 14_000+ Active Smash Childhood Cancer 8 years+ 84_000+ Active Help Stop TB 193 days+ 443 Active Mapping Cancer Markers 265 years+ 840_000+ Active Beta Testing 70 days+ 1_000+ Intermittent Microbiome Immunity Project 35y 265d 01:39:46 222_779 2017-08 to 2021-08 OpenZika 7y 290d 04:23:01 65_778 2016-05 to 2019-12 FightAIDS@Home 2 10y 352d 12:24:47 30_648 2015-09 to 2020-10 Outsmart Ebola Together 3y 101d 15:01:33 9_312 2014-12 to 2018-12 420 years+ 1.

Updates 2022/2023

http://firepear.net/grid/updates-2022/ 2023-08-21
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.

Storage@Homefarm

http://firepear.net/grid/storage/ 2022-06-01
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.

Upgrade upcycling

http://firepear.net/grid/upcycle/ 2021-12-16
We want our hardware to keep doing good work after it’s cycled out of active use in our fleet. So we do rebuilds, turning extra hardware from upgrades into complete machines. These machines are then distributed to people who can give them a good home. CPU RAM GPU Storage New assignment Ryzen R5 1600 32G GTX 1650 S 500G M.2 Climatology; science communication Ryzen R3 2200G 16G — 500G M.2 Video production; community building Ryzen R9 3900X 32G — — Art production (donated as parts, with mobo) Ryzen R9 2700 16G GTX 1050 Ti 500G M.

Updates 2021

http://firepear.net/grid/updates-2021/ 2021-11-04
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.

Copy

http://firepear.net/r22/copy/ 2021-03-08
This is the story of trying to fix one problem, in one headword entry in the thesaurus corpus. Having gotten my 1911 Roget’s out of storage, for use as a backstop in making determinations about errors reported by rlint, I decided it was time to start work. The first entry flagged was: Copy : tests ✘ : Invalid char '-' in sense 3 (N sense 3) term "transcript", attr "copy into a non-visual form" The message makes it clear what the technical issue here is: currently, attributes/notations on terms are not allowed to contain hyphens.

Reboot

http://firepear.net/r22/reboot/ 2021-02-22
The Roget22 project is my second-oldest project, yet it hasn’t made it out into the world. Its goal is to produce a beautiful, maintained, electronic thesaurus which is as much a pleasure to peruse as the original. It got stuck several years ago as a result of me painting myself into a corner with my chosen data representation, and then getting frustrated with the amount of work I had created for myself as a result.

Updates 2020

http://firepear.net/grid/updates-2020/ 2020-08-25
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.

Greenhouse 2

http://firepear.net/grid/greenhouse2/ 2020-08-23
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.

Project Greenroom

http://firepear.net/grid/greenroom/ 2020-07-11
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: Four Raspberry Pi 4 Model Bs (4GB version), 4 heatsink sets, and 3 16GB SD cards (I already had one spare).