Taking shots like these makes me want a tripod with a motorized star tracking mount. And a telescope with adapter to attach my camera to.
The night sky
CPU cooling
I decided to add a second fan to the radiator of the CPU’s liquid cooler (a pre-filled self contained unit that came with the system) to get a push-pull cooling configuration. The air being blown out the case seemed a little on the warm side, so I figured a second fan would help keep things cooler.
The fan is a Scythe S-FLEX 120 mm case fan (which seems to have been just deactivated on Newegg…maybe I bought their last one). The original radiator fan started buzzing so I purchased one to replace it. Now there are two of them blowing air through the radiator. Really nice fan, very quiet, which is why I bought another one.
Getting more air flow through the radiator now, and the exhausted air feels a little bit cooler.
Then I thought “I wonder what the motherboard thinks the CPU temperature is”. I had never bothered to monitor any of the motherboard sensors before. After a little bit of searching, I installed lm-sensors.
If the output of sensors is to be believed, then the CPU cores at idle are running around 45-47°C.
| Core | Temp (°C) |
| Core 0 | 45 |
| Core 1 | 46 |
| Core 2 | 47 |
| Core 3 | 45 |
Seems pretty high to me. I’d have expected something in the 30s.
Starting up the distributed.net client drives up the detected temperature into the high 80s.
| Core | Temp (°C) |
| Core 0 | 86 |
| Core 1 | 89 |
| Core 2 | 83 |
| Core 3 | 85 |
Whoa. Way high, and much higher than I expected.
So now I’m starting wonder: is the motherboard temperature sensor accurate? Is there a problem with the cooling block? Should I take it off and inspect it? Maybe it’s time for another cooler?
The other thing I need to do is check the temperatures reported by the BIOS to see how it compares. I think a little investigation is in order.
Update: BIOS shows pretty much the same temperature (~47°C). Definitely time for some investigating. These temps just seem a little higher than they should be.
Update 2: A little bit of Google’ing shows that idle temps in the 40s aren’t unusual for the i7-930. My temps are still a little on the high end of the range that I’ve been seeing. Maybe a cooler upgrade is in my future soon. The Corsair H70 looks nice.
Update 3: The second fan seems to be helping. Under distributed.net load, the CPU is running in the low 70s now
| Core | Temp (°C) |
| Core 0 | 73 |
| Core 1 | 75 |
| Core 2 | 71 |
| Core 3 | 72 |
Help-Portrait 2011
Coming up on December 10 the 2011 Help-Portrait event. This will be my third Help-Portrait I’m helping out with, and like last year the Charleston Help-Portrait event is piggy-backing on the Charleston Convoy of Hope outreach event. This year there are four Convoy of Hope sites, and I’ve heard there will be a Help-Portrait set up at each of them. I’m planning to be at the Johns Island location, at Haute Gap charter school. Hopefully the weather will be better than it was last year.
On December 9, Joe Nienstedt has once again organized a Help-Portrait event at MUSC Children’s Hospital which I’m hoping to be a part of again. That will depend on what time the presentations for BioE 850 are supposed to take place. Hopefully it won’t be the same time as Help-Portrait. Last year it was a lot of fun to do.
What is Help-Portrait? Watch the video. It explains the idea pretty well.
Radiation dose tracking
Many of the x-ray machines I work with, particularly the newer ones, have some capability of recording the amount of radiation used during a procedure, which can be used to estimate the radiation dose to patients.
A dose report is usually generated and stored with the patient images, and on some systems it can be sent to the PACS. This is good.
In almost all cases, the information is sent as just a screen capture wrapped up in DICOM headers. This is not so good. Good for archiving, lousy for searching.
It occurred to me that I should be able to set up a DICOM receiver that the machines could send the dose reports to, do some OCR on the images to extract the numbers that I need and then stash it all in a database. This is essentially the way ACR’s Dose Index Registry (DIR) works but it relies on getting the dose reports as a DICOM Structured Report. A lot easier to get at dose data that way and no need to OCR and parse images. Data in the DIR is anonymized, but for my purposes the dose data would only be partially anonymized.
The OCR part would require some kind of machine specific mapping to identify what parts of the image contain what information. Sadly, some machines are completely incapable of sending the dose reports anywhere (I’m looking at you Siemens). Some way of dealing with those machines will be needed. Studies with lots of series will have multi-page dose reports which is another case that will need to be dealt with.
Nation wide some of this info is being collected in the National Radiology Dose Registry, but all of that data has to come from somewhere, and has to be extracted somehow. This would help us see what goes on locally, and would be a useful source of information. If a dose estimate needed to be done, we could look up the numbers, do a little bit of crunching and come up with something reasonably accurate. It would also be a good data source for studying radiation exposures.
I need to work on this.
Linux Counter Project
The Linux Counter Project was revived and revamped a few months ago so I’ve been updating the info on my machines.
