Grid

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.
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.
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.
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.
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: Four Raspberry Pi 4 Model Bs (4GB version), 4 heatsink sets, and 3 16GB SD cards (I already had one spare).
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.
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.
After months of pondering what GPU to use to get my compute farm back into crunching GPGPU workunits, I was persuaded by a recent review to order a GTX 1650 and give it a go. Background and lead-up Years ago, I was reading stories about how Linux support on Steam had really improved. I decided to build a Linux box capable of running modern-ish games. This was in 2015, a time when AMD GPU support on Linux was abominable, so my choice for a video card boiled down to “which Nvidia card?