Report WU's as "abandoned" when a project is reset or detached...

Because of the recent upload failure problems with BOINC, SETI, and/or the server-side apps, many people have reset the SETI project, or they detached from the project, or otherwise "lost" WU's. It seems to have become a standard troubleshooting technique to reset or detach the troublesome project(s), sometimes several times. These somewhat misguided attempts to "jar" the project, or CC, or SC into "working" tend to create "orphan" WU's at the projects, those WU's that the project server thinks are sent and being processed, but the results of which will never be returned to the project. The presence of these "orphan" WU's delays the science for the project.

When a user takes some action that would result in a WU's being lost and not reported to the appropriate project in a timely manner, the BOINC CC, in conjunction with a project's Science app, should automatically report the WU's as "abandoned", "scrapped", or some other appropriate status indicating that the WU will never be reported as "Complete" by that computer.

It would take a minimum amount of time, bandwidth, and host and server processing to report the "abandoned" status to the project. It would result in an "abandoned" WU not having to wait until the deadline date had passed to be re-sent to a new user, thereby hastening the process of receiving the quorum of results required by the project, allow further processing of results at the project to be done sooner, and allow user credits to be allocated faster.

The way it is done now, it takes far too long to restart the process after a WU is lost through a users actions.

It would probably take changes to both the BOINC CC, since the project is reset/detached through the CC, and the CC would handle the status updates just as it now handles the "Ready to report" status updates, and the project science app, to determine which existing WU's need to be reported to the project as "abandoned." Of course, the server-side apps would also need to be changed to handle the new status.

While this is not a perfect solution to the problem of lost WU's (the user could still delete the BOINC folder and/or files), it would seem a better approach to this problem than is currently in use.

Please give consideration to this suggested change. I feel it will enhance the system for the betterment of the projects, with the side benefit of also helping the users.

Thank you for your consideration.

Best regards,

Stephen

---

<P>"I want to go dancing on the moon, I want to frolic in zero gravity!....", and now, I might be able to go someday! Thanks, SpaceShipOne and crew!<BR><a><img src="http://69.93.59.107/stats/banner.php?cpid=26cbd89db7fb85cbfe580729d76705c1"></a>