Grid

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.

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.

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.

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:

2019-11-03: 75 years; last update of the year

Today we crossed 75 years of compute time for WCG.

Two other events happened earlier this week: the Africa Rainfall Project kicked off, and we finished our 3900X upgrade. We’re excited about both, especially since finishing the upgrades let us build two more nodes out of spare parts. We now have 128 threads in-house.

Here’s to next year!

2019-08-16: Top 1000; New hardware; Visiting friends

Thanks to a visit from user Sheridon of Xstreme Systems Team, we broke into the top 1000 teams a few days earlier than expected. We are now #931 by points, and #997 by WUs returned!

The Firepear computing stack is currently all Ryzen. It’s simple cost-benefit analysis: I’m interested in crunching as much data as possible per unit time, at a reasonable cost (in both money and electricity). Right now, that’s Ryzen.

I’m upgrading all my machines to the new R9 3900X CPU. This provides an opportunity to compare all three generations of the Ryzen family.

3900X vs 3950X

I want to throw as many cores as I can at the problems that I volunteer compute time for, but I also have a finite budget. The 3950X will be beyond my reach at launch, so my strategy is to upgrade to 3900X starting in early July.