All dressed up and no work to do

[HankB]

I had to shut down Rosetta on my laptop prior to the holidays because it became obvious that the cooling fan had issues. It made a relatively loud rattling noise whenever it kicked in. With the holidays behind, I called Lenovo and ordered a replacement part (about $50 with shipping included - not too bad since it includes the heat pipe and contact pads for the processor and support chip.) Along with that, I also bumped RAM up to 8GB. (Go big or go home!) I started out with a few work units and only ran one at a time (one processor core of two) a short time before shutting the laptop down to let it cool. I wanted to ramp up the thermal cycles as gradually as possible to allow the thermal paste time to cure if needed. About the time I'm ready to hit it with both cores, pedal to the metal... Rosetta goes down.

<sigh>

Their web site is down too so I know of no way to determine how long the outage might last. I suppose if Stanford is on semester break, there might not be regular staff there to deal with the problem. Or maybe they're taking advantage of the break to perform some maintenance on their computers or networks.

Anyone else know what's going on?

Also a note to others who might consider crunching on a laptop: It might take a toll on the H/W. I'm pretty sure that nearly a year of crunching on my T500 resulted in the premature deterioration of the cooling fan. Unfortunately it was not premature enough. It went bad about a month after I went out of warranty.

 

[Bobnova]

I keep some WCG going along with Rosetta so that if Rosetta goes down it fails over to 100% WCG.

They'll probably post an update eventually, though that requires their server to be non-dead of course.

 

[muddocktor]

Yeah, I tried going to their main site this morning and everything is down. My poor work laptop has less than a day's worth of work left on it to do. I haven't a clue as to how my home systems are sitting as far as work goes, but I imagine they are running low too.

@HankB, I have folded or crunched on the last 4 work laptops I've owned and never had any hardware failures. That includes cooling fans too. I guess that you just happened to get a fan that was weak to start with.

 

[HankB]

@HankB, I have folded or crunched on the last 4 work laptops I've owned and never had any hardware failures. That includes cooling fans too. I guess that you just happened to get a fan that was weak to start with.

I'm curious how long you crunched with them. I'm hoping this is not a sign that build quality is dropping for Lenovo compared to Thinkpads. It certainly could be a sample defect vs. an overall trend. In fact, I would hope that would be the case.

My desktop ran out of work earlier this evening so I switched it over to Einstein. The laptop now crunches Climateprediction. Two WUs are estimated at ~87 hours each.

 

[muddocktor]

Let's see now, I'll try to figure out how much crunching I did with them.

Dell Inspiron 8000 - P3 1 Gig - had it 3 years and it ran either F@H or Seti any time it was booted up, which would probably be 75% of the time. I then sold it to a friend, who left it running Seti for another 3-4 years.

Powernotebooks.com labeled laptop - Pentium M 2 Gig - Had it 3 years and it ran the same way as I ran the last one. Gave it to my daughter and my wife then walked on it and broke the screen when she left the damn thing on the floor.

Dell Inspiron E7405 - C2D T7400 - Ran it almost 3 years and it crunched Seti or Rosetta in the above parameters.

Asus lappy in my sig - T9600 - It's been running Rosetta or Seti as above parameters since I got it new, which is a little over 2 years ago.

 

[HankB]

Dell Inspiron 8000 - P3 1 Gig - had it 3 years and it ran either F@H or Seti any time it was booted up, which would probably be 75% of the time. I then sold it to a friend, who left it running Seti for another 3-4 years.

That's awesome!

 

[dfonda]

Ok Its not me...I'll switch over to f@h until they come back.