how to asign each project some cpu time

Questions and Answers : Preferences : how to asign each project some cpu time
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pitat450
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Message 410973 - Posted: 30 Aug 2006, 9:42:43 UTC

My question here would be>

When i have two or more projects and i want to asign my cpu usage lets say 10 minutes for one project and the other ten minutes for the orher one, how to do it?
is switching betwwen applications (60m) for this?
because if so, it does not work for me right...

thnx
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Message 411145 - Posted: 30 Aug 2006, 14:45:37 UTC - in response to Message 410973.  

My question here would be>

When i have two or more projects and i want to asign my cpu usage lets say 10 minutes for one project and the other ten minutes for the orher one, how to do it?
is switching betwwen applications (60m) for this?
because if so, it does not work for me right...

thnx

Yes, that is the correct setting. Are you sure you want to switch every 10 minutes?
This setting would cause your computer to waste a lot of cycles just switching between projects. The prefered setting is 60 minutes. This is because it takes a lot of cpu cycles and disk reads to switch projects. The more often you switch, the more cpu cycles and disk reads/writes used without benefitting either you or the project.
Of course this is entirely up to you. Did you update BOINC after you made the change? If not, go to a project preference page and change your settings then go into the BOINC "projects" tab and highlight that project and hit the "update" button. This should enable your preferences in BOINC properly. Unless you manually hit the "update" button your preferences will not take effect until the next time BOINC contacts a project for some other reason (to report results, request more work, etc.).
Jim

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Message 411158 - Posted: 30 Aug 2006, 15:13:55 UTC

It is not a good idea to have the projects switch every 10 min. As Jim said it wastes a lot of time. Also if you don't leave the project in memory it will restart at the last checkpoint again wasting time. Some projects have very few checkpoints so it is better to complete as much of a WU as possible before switching. I believe that the newer Boinc manager may wait until the next checkpoint before switching (at least there was discussion about implementing this on the Alpha mailing list) which is possibly why the 10 min. setting is not working for you.

Personally I set mine for two hours so that for some projects a WU is completed before switching.

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Message 411215 - Posted: 30 Aug 2006, 16:32:29 UTC - in response to Message 411158.  

It is not a good idea to have the projects switch every 10 min. As Jim said it wastes a lot of time. Also if you don't leave the project in memory it will restart at the last checkpoint again wasting time. Some projects have very few checkpoints so it is better to complete as much of a WU as possible before switching. I believe that the newer Boinc manager may wait until the next checkpoint before switching (at least there was discussion about implementing this on the Alpha mailing list) which is possibly why the 10 min. setting is not working for you.

Personally I set mine for two hours so that for some projects a WU is completed before switching.


well i would be completely satisfied with the 60 minutes settings but i was gonna test if the projects switch at all. so i put 1 minute change just 4 test...well it does not workkk...dunno why
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Message 411242 - Posted: 30 Aug 2006, 17:09:32 UTC
Last modified: 30 Aug 2006, 17:12:24 UTC

Maybe there is a minimal setting for switching between projects, and everything below that is ignored?

Also, they do NOT necessarily switch exactly at that time. It'll sometimes run past it a couple times, before switching, because of the way BOINC treats the projects run times. It uses a debt system. If a system is run too long it gains a lot of debt that needs to be paid off by not doing work for it, then the other project(s) run until that's paid off, then the swapping happens again. Example is my Dual XEON 2.4G HT. It runs 3 projects. One project may run about 24 hours all by itself, then the other one runs the next 24 hours. I almost never see the two projects on the box simutaneously, anymore. Of course it runs a 3rd project that never goes away (CPDN), and almost never gets preempted (has the highest share), but the other two projects just switch when they are ready.

Because debt is not counted by time, but by FLOPs (or so it seems from what I can see on my systems), an hour of run time will have different sized debt consumption. Each project is unique in it's calculations, so one might, for example, 10 flops a second, where one will only do 6. So, the one doing 10 gained more debt in that second than the one that did 6.

I know people want to see it do "exactly what they tell it to do", but this is not the real way it will work.

BOINC is BEST when just left to it's own resources. Allow the projects to work, if you are running 2 projects, and have a 50/50 split on them, they should in the long run, honor that.


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Message 411329 - Posted: 30 Aug 2006, 20:43:47 UTC - in response to Message 411242.  

hey it wazzz easy,
the other project was halted or stoped by user manually (if i do the translation right) so i just renewed it and now it works like charm!
perfekt...
thanx for interesting explanationn ;)
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Message 411941 - Posted: 31 Aug 2006, 16:22:06 UTC

When you change the default setting of switch between applications every 60 minutes to something else, do an Update of the project through BOINC, it still takes the initial 60 minutes (or remainder thereof) before the change is propagated. A way around this is to exit BOINC and restart it, immediately after you updated the project.
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Message 412014 - Posted: 31 Aug 2006, 18:04:22 UTC - in response to Message 411941.  

When you change the default setting of switch between applications every 60 minutes to something else, do an Update of the project through BOINC, it still takes the initial 60 minutes (or remainder thereof) before the change is propagated. A way around this is to exit BOINC and restart it, immediately after you updated the project.


Ok thanx!
also i had other question, but i posted it at the linux forum and noone replied till now try to "spam" it over here since probably more people read this...

the wuestion is...
where the temp files are stored on my computer. The project folder contains some text files but they are too small i think. Then are these files removed after the data sent to server. And why is in preferences "max download value" so high (100Gb) for i am doing my 3rd task and downloaded only 3MB?

sorry once again for double posting. (If this is solved i would post a link back there)
tank you
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Message 412030 - Posted: 31 Aug 2006, 18:45:39 UTC - in response to Message 412014.  

where the temp files are stored on my computer. The project folder contains some text files but they are too small i think. Then are these files removed after the data sent to server.

Temp files? You mean those when installing BOINC? Those are in your general Temp folder in Windows. C:\\Windows\\Temp, I think.

If you mean the messages in Boinc Manager, they are written to the stderrdae.txt and stdoutdae.txt files. These are cleaned up once in a while and started all over, while the original logs are then transferred to the std*.old files.

And why is in preferences "max download value" so high (100Gb) for i am doing my 3rd task and downloaded only 3MB?

There is no maximum download value with 100GB. The default setting for BOINC to use 100GB is at the "Use no more than " value under Disk and memory usage.

At this moment there are about 31 projects that you can crunch with BOINC. If you want to attach to all of them, you need a lot of disk space. Check the requirements here in this list. And that's only some of the projects available.
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Message 412131 - Posted: 31 Aug 2006, 20:53:39 UTC - in response to Message 412030.  

no no, i ment the files that are downloaded when you get some work, must be some temporary files written somewhere...
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Message 412166 - Posted: 31 Aug 2006, 21:59:32 UTC - in response to Message 412131.  

no no, i ment the files that are downloaded when you get some work, must be some temporary files written somewhere...

The results you get to work on are stored in your \\BOINC\\projects\\setiathome.berkeley.edu\\ folder. When a result is crunching, it is moved to one of the slots in \\BOINC\\slots\\
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Message 412168 - Posted: 31 Aug 2006, 22:00:52 UTC - in response to Message 412131.  
Last modified: 31 Aug 2006, 22:01:42 UTC

no no, i ment the files that are downloaded when you get some work, must be some temporary files written somewhere...

The WU's are stored under BOINC\\projects\\setiathome.berkeley.edu and are files of some 364kB.
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Questions and Answers : Preferences : how to asign each project some cpu time


 
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