Suspending a project.

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Message 112117 - Posted: 17 May 2005, 18:50:39 UTC

I run BOINC 4.25. With this core, I can choose to "Suspend" a project and later "Resume" it. My question revolves around my understanding of how the projects are scheduled.

As I understand it, if I run 2 projects and they have equal share values, in an ideal world, each project would get 12 hours per day on a 24/7.

I believe it works a little differently in practice. Each project runs up credits and debts and the scheduler swaps processes depending on which project has the greater debt.

So is that roughly right to start with?

What then happens if I manually suspend a project? Does the project loose the time it was suspended for, or does the scheduler allocate that lost time at a later date by modifying the debt/credit for the project, or what?



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Message 112129 - Posted: 17 May 2005, 19:53:44 UTC - in response to Message 112117.  

What then happens if I manually suspend a project? Does the project loose the time it was suspended for, or does the scheduler allocate that lost time at a later date by modifying the debt/credit for the project, or what?


adrian, You're not being ignored. You've aske a great question. Since the whole scheduler thing is so new, I bet it'll take a project dev or programmer to answer it. be patient.

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Message 112132 - Posted: 17 May 2005, 19:59:00 UTC - in response to Message 112117.  

I run BOINC 4.25. With this core, I can choose to "Suspend" a project and later "Resume" it. My question revolves around my understanding of how the projects are scheduled.

As I understand it, if I run 2 projects and they have equal share values, in an ideal world, each project would get 12 hours per day on a 24/7.

I believe it works a little differently in practice. Each project runs up credits and debts and the scheduler swaps processes depending on which project has the greater debt.

So is that roughly right to start with?


Yes
[quote}
What then happens if I manually suspend a project? Does the project loose the time it was suspended for, or does the scheduler allocate that lost time at a later date by modifying the debt/credit for the project, or what?
[/quote]
No time is lost, other than a quick check to see that it is paused, before it goes back to the other project(s). The different projects only count actual time spent processing in the request of credits.


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Message 112133 - Posted: 17 May 2005, 20:01:52 UTC - in response to Message 112117.  
Last modified: 17 May 2005, 20:16:42 UTC

I run BOINC 4.25. With this core, I can choose to "Suspend" a project and later "Resume" it. My question revolves around my understanding of how the projects are scheduled.

As I understand it, if I run 2 projects and they have equal share values, in an ideal world, each project would get 12 hours per day on a 24/7.

I believe it works a little differently in practice. Each project runs up credits and debts and the scheduler swaps processes depending on which project has the greater debt. It appeared that the allocation of cpu time stayed the same as always as long as the scheduler wasn't in deadline trouble for any old work that was still there when resumed.

So is that roughly right to start with?

What then happens if I manually suspend a project? Does the project loose the time it was suspended for, or does the scheduler allocate that lost time at a later date by modifying the debt/credit for the project, or what?




From what I could tell from the experiment I was just running, the suspended project starts building up long term debt. When it gets resumed, the client scheduler will start favoring it over the others by inhibiting them from getting new work until the resource share (overall) comes back into line with what you had specified in your project prefs. It appeared that the cpu time split when running stayed the same as before for work already in the cache (also based on the resource share) as long as the clients scheduler wasn't in deadline and/or connect time trouble when you resumed the suspended one.

This was observed on the 4.3x and 4.4x versions.

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Message 112140 - Posted: 17 May 2005, 20:24:21 UTC - in response to Message 112117.  

I run BOINC 4.25. With this core, I can choose to "Suspend" a project and later "Resume" it. My question revolves around my understanding of how the projects are scheduled.

As I understand it, if I run 2 projects and they have equal share values, in an ideal world, each project would get 12 hours per day on a 24/7.

I believe it works a little differently in practice. Each project runs up credits and debts and the scheduler swaps processes depending on which project has the greater debt.

So is that roughly right to start with?

What then happens if I manually suspend a project? Does the project loose the time it was suspended for, or does the scheduler allocate that lost time at a later date by modifying the debt/credit for the project, or what?

We're talking about 4.25, not 4.42, so the long-term debt issues (and the discussion of the "new" scheduler) doesn't apply to the original question.

... and in fact, I believe that two projects with equal shares will get 12 hours out of every 24 on average. It doesn't work out like clockwork because BOINC will only check once per hour (or longer if you set it that way) and it may swap when it finishes one WU and starts another.

... and that's assuming that both projects have work all the time.

In the new scheduler, long term debt builds so that projects like LHC which are currently out of work will get most of the processing when they have work again, or to give a project preferential treatment after an outage. It will do an even better job of hitting the shares, but you have to average over a longer time to see it.
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Message 112147 - Posted: 17 May 2005, 21:06:00 UTC - in response to Message 112140.  
Last modified: 17 May 2005, 21:06:17 UTC

We're talking about 4.25, not 4.42, so the long-term debt issues (and the discussion of the "new" scheduler) doesn't apply to the original question.

... and in fact, I believe that two projects with equal shares will get 12 hours out of every 24 on average. It doesn't work out like clockwork because BOINC will only check once per hour (or longer if you set it that way) and it may swap when it finishes one WU and starts another.

... and that's assuming that both projects have work all the time.

In the new scheduler, long term debt builds so that projects like LHC which are currently out of work will get most of the processing when they have work again, or to give a project preferential treatment after an outage. It will do an even better job of hitting the shares, but you have to average over a longer time to see it.


I realized that after I had hit OK, that's why I came back and qualified the comment.

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Message 112440 - Posted: 18 May 2005, 14:30:56 UTC
Last modified: 18 May 2005, 14:43:01 UTC

So the newer clients have long term debt then. So the extra control 4.2x gave you is being taken away through the back door by the newer clients? If I want to stop a project for a few hours, then start it again, the scheduler is going to give it more time to catch up the time I docked it?

What is the point of the extra controls if the scheduler is going to work against you? Seems a little odd that's all.
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Message 112453 - Posted: 18 May 2005, 15:15:41 UTC - in response to Message 112440.  

So the newer clients have long term debt then. So the extra control 4.2x gave you is being taken away through the back door by the newer clients? If I want to stop a project for a few hours, then start it again, the scheduler is going to give it more time to catch up the time I docked it?

What is the point of the extra controls if the scheduler is going to work against you? Seems a little odd that's all.

It isn't really.

As an example, yesterday I had some LHC@Home work to process. So, to process them faster I suspended all other projects on that machine. So, it worked through the LHC@Home work.

When I enabled the other projects they would fall back to even up the debt so all projects got the percentage in resource share. There is no concept of balance my work load between the projects unless I manually intervene.

The manual interverntion is seen as an anomoly and not a new allocation.
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Message 112459 - Posted: 18 May 2005, 15:34:20 UTC
Last modified: 18 May 2005, 15:36:09 UTC

With LHC not issuing wu's at the moment, (I haven't had any for some days), it would be building up debt. When new wu's arrive, my machine will preferentially process LHC, thus my RAC at the other projects will go down.

If I manually suspend a project because my RAC is good enough and I can "afford" to give some more time to another project to build it up a little, when I resume the suspended project, all my manual interventions will be wiped out by the scheduler as the project I had suspended will get it's time back and the project I wanted to boost will return to it's previous level.

It would not be an issue if everyone was running all projects, but they are not. If LHC sends 1,000,000 wu's out, and my machine starts feasting on them because it has not seen any for a while, my RAC at another project relative to another BOINC'er who does not run LHC will suffer.

*** EDIT ***

I don't think I'm explaining this very well!
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Message 112463 - Posted: 18 May 2005, 15:42:23 UTC

A suspended project builds LT debt.


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Message 112466 - Posted: 18 May 2005, 15:47:28 UTC - in response to Message 112463.  

A suspended project builds LT debt.

John,

It appears that a project which is out of work does not build long term debt, is that correct?

-- Ned
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Message 112467 - Posted: 18 May 2005, 15:48:38 UTC - in response to Message 112459.  

If I manually suspend a project because my RAC is good enough and I can "afford" to give some more time to another project to build it up a little, when I resume the suspended project, all my manual interventions will be wiped out by the scheduler as the project I had suspended will get it's time back and the project I wanted to boost will return to it's previous level.

Why not tweak the resource share instead of suspending projects?

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Message 112473 - Posted: 18 May 2005, 16:06:40 UTC

That is what I used to do with 4.19. I thought the whole point of getting these extra controls was to give us control at the client rather then having to work through the project web servers.
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Message 112481 - Posted: 18 May 2005, 16:27:15 UTC

I remember reading about the debt issue a long time ago in Beta. It's what they have wanted to do for some time and they are just now getting to work on it. If you are so worried about your rac, then set the resource share low for the project(s) that don't mean as much to you. Will that solve your problem?, no but it's either that or detach from the offending project. Hope I don't sound like an ass.
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Message 112488 - Posted: 18 May 2005, 16:55:27 UTC

I don't think you sound like an ass, I think you sound like you understand what I mean!

Yes, I can detach/attach, yes I can and do set my resource share for each project.

I just don't see what the point is of giving us controls if their use is compromised by other elements of the system. If "today" I want to do more PPaH for some reason, I suspend the other projects, crunch away, then resume the rest and the benefit I chose to give PPaH on my machines will now be eroded away by BOINC without consulting me.

The debt business may work well for those who just sign up for a project and then never look at it again, but these are not the people that would notice a deadline problem anyway.
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Message 112500 - Posted: 18 May 2005, 17:23:41 UTC - in response to Message 112488.  


I just don't see what the point is of giving us controls if their use is compromised by other elements of the system. If "today" I want to do more PPaH for some reason, I suspend the other projects, crunch away, then resume the rest and the benefit I chose to give PPaH on my machines will now be eroded away by BOINC without consulting me.

I think that the controls work, just not the way you expect. That's a documentation problem.

... and it seems to me that you're complaining that BOINC takes the resource shares you've assigned to the project too seriously.

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Message 112522 - Posted: 18 May 2005, 17:51:28 UTC
Last modified: 18 May 2005, 17:52:15 UTC

adrianxw, I like the way the current stable version works myself. And I totally get what your saying but since I haven't used
the development version, I can't really say if I like the how the debt works or not.
But I knew that they wanted to have the debt feature so I guess I'll find out how it works when that time comes.
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Message 112541 - Posted: 18 May 2005, 18:23:14 UTC - in response to Message 112488.  

I just don't see what the point is of giving us controls if their use is compromised by other elements of the system. If "today" I want to do more PPaH for some reason, I suspend the other projects, crunch away, then resume the rest and the benefit I chose to give PPaH on my machines will now be eroded away by BOINC without consulting me.

The debt business may work well for those who just sign up for a project and then never look at it again, but these are not the people that would notice a deadline problem anyway.


I think the point of the changes is to prevent missed deadlines and to maintain the balance you've specified in the resource shares w/o the manual tweaking. The new scheduler does do a much better job of preventing missed deadlines and overallocation of the host. If you really don't want the resource shares re-balanced you can manually edit the client_state.xml file (set all debts to "0.00000", somebody will have a util for this soon). I understand your point but rather than take away the controls maybe they should be just be reconsidered as now being for short term (a few minutes) to finish up something or change something or test something rather than a long term manual tweak of the scheduling.

Overall I think we "crunchers" are just used to tweaking things more than is now required. The scheduler will "tweak" for us and we miss our "tweaking" ;-) I've resolved to just tweak elsewhere (finding background services that I don't need running, etc. etc.). Maybe even trying to run Linux on a cruncher for my own education. Have fun.
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Message 112542 - Posted: 18 May 2005, 18:25:46 UTC - in response to Message 112500.  


I think that the controls work, just not the way you expect. That's a documentation problem.

... and it seems to me that you're complaining that BOINC takes the resource shares you've assigned to the project too seriously.


So "Suspend" does not me suspend, it seems to mean postpone. That's a conceptual fault, not a documentation error.

By the way, they are my machines, I reserve the right to take my resource shares as seriously as I like. You don't know me, getting personal is not going to get any of us anywhere.
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Message 112547 - Posted: 18 May 2005, 18:35:22 UTC - in response to Message 112488.  
Last modified: 18 May 2005, 18:39:29 UTC

I just don't see what the point is of giving us controls if their use is compromised by other elements of the system. If "today" I want to do more PPaH for some reason, I suspend the other projects, crunch away, then resume the rest and the benefit I chose to give PPaH on my machines will now be eroded away by BOINC without consulting me.


Adrianxw, I understand what you're saying. I'm on version 4.27 and have my resource share and cache settings tweaked exactly the way I want them in order to give me the daily output of SETI and Einstein I want without ever coming close to missing a deadline. Last week I suspended Einstein for a day just because I wanted to crunch more SETI and check out the performance of the new optimized client. When I started Einstein back up, I wouldn't have wanted the client to try and compensate for the downtime, I just wanted it to start crunching again from that point forward according to my resource share.

I can't comment or complain about any of the newer versions since I haven't tried them, but from what John stated it does sound like much of the functionality of the suspend button has been taken away. Unfortunately, I believe this kind of thing has become necessary to accomodate folks who can't be bothered to set reasonable cache and resource shares for their machines.

It'll all work out in the end. :)

Dig
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Message boards : Number crunching : Suspending a project.


 
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