Personally, I don't like the idea of getting shot down by friendly fire. ;-)

Yes, your are right, but 42 days of deadline as I see - are too many.
How many results, not reported in the 30-35 days, are reported in 42 days?
I don't know but admins do, I think.
Better to have shorter deadlines (ok, without any retroactivity) and reasign task asap. It's not my problem. It is the space on disk of the project.

Bye
FF

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Y'all could always donate to the Fall Donation Challenge!

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A law that specifically prevents money to go to SETI...

Link please.

A law that specifically prevents FEDERAL TAX DOLLARS from going to SETI.

As a SETI@Home supporter, I of course think that the work is worthwhile, but I understand that other tax payers might not want their tax dollars to go to something that does not interest them.

Google "William Proxmire SETI" and see what you get. That should get you close enough....

I hope Proxmire burns in hell. People call debating about Gay Marriage trivial, and yet there was NO CNN coverage about this.

Or maybe there was and I wan't even born yet.

CNN wasn't born yet.

My friend, you should be much more tolerant.

I don't know how well you did your research, but while we would not always agree with Sen. Proxmire, he basically had a good idea.

Tax dollars are taken from from the taxpayers. When you've been a wage slave for a few decades, you'll know more about it than you really want to know.

In turn, the government is obligated to spend the money that they've taken on things that are important. If you read history, you'll see that the Federal government is mainly intended to provide for the common defense (i.e. one army instead of each of the 13 colonies having their own) and to regulate commerce between the states.

Pretty much everything else should be left to the individual states, and certainly that isn't how it works 230 years later.

The government does some things that I really like, but on average, it also does a bunch where I personally wish they'd get as far from as possible.

The senator, with his Golden Fleece award, tried to target things that were an amazing, incredible waste of those tax dollars.

Things like a U.S. Department of Justice study of why prisoners wanted to get out of Jail.

On SETI, he was wrong.

I still wish the government spent less money, and let me allocate that tax savings as I see fit.

If the late Senator was alive today, he'd have tons to say about my tax dollars buying other people new cars.

More reading:

http://books.google.com/books?id=f7YKgXxyQmwC&lpg=PA104&ots=7w2P65Hvev&dq=proxmire%20seti%2013%20things&pg=PA97#v=onepage&q=&f=false

iiiimmmmmmmmmmm a dumbass....

lol.

BOINC is being a little wonky. I'm trying to cut down on how often I use the network, I monitor the different graphs and enable network communication when it's low, but BOINC wants to do it other times.

What I do, is to help the Replica DB catch up, is I let the tasks upload, and then report/update twice a week. Well, after all of the uploads, it tries to update, even if I keep the network comms disabled the entire time.

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30+ Computers heading our way! Currently at the "Zomg we need to talk to our tech expert at the co-op about this first!!!" stage. 16 Lab machines and 14+ Staff machines each with 2.2Ghz CPUs and 256MB ram. Think they balance? The RAM certainly is bad

Personally, I don't like the idea of getting shot down by friendly fire. ;-)

Yes, your are right, but 42 days of deadline as I see - are too many.

Before we can even talk about what the deadline should be, we need to talk about why we even have deadlines.

In a perfect world, deadlines are not needed. Work would go out to be crunched, get crunched, and would always be returned.

We do not live in a perfect world. Computers die. People go on vacation and turn them off without thinking (okay, no one who visits the forums, we're exceptional), they quit without giving a second thought. Lot of reasons.

Deadlines exist to detect lost work.

So, the next question is: what happens if the deadline is too short?

A machine crunches constantly and diligently, and returns the result late. In the meantime, work is reassigned, and the third cruncher does work that is not strictly needed -- it could have done a different work unit, or if SETI is short of work, it could have done work for another project (or we could have saved the electricity, or who knows what).

A side effect of short deadlines: you eliminate those with slower machines from participating, except on the shortest deadlines.

The opposite question is: what happens if the deadline is too long?

Because work is not reissued until the deadline, lost work takes a little longer to detect. It takes a little longer for that work unit to validate.

If there is enough work, and every work unit is equally likely to produce a result, then reissues are not more important than original work units.

Yes, they do have to be kept in the SETI database, but if you're worried about the overall database size, just purge completed results as soon as they validate.

I don't think we should be changing deadlines to "help out" the database.

Better to put that effort into data recorder problems.

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Agreed, but just to elaborate on your comments about the deadlines a bit.

It's not so much how long the deadline is in absolute terms, but what I like to refer to as the 'Tightness Factor' of the deadline.

IOWs the ratio of how long the task will actually take compared to the time allowed to run by the deadline.

IIRC, with the last deadline settings made, shorties are actually a little higher TF than the longer deadline tasks in MB.

<edit> Correct that, it's the other way around. The longer running AR's got their deadlines shortened up a bit, while the shorties stayed pretty much the same. However, when the resolution of the analysis got doubled recently, a side effect was the TF also doubled since the deadlines stayed the same.

Another effect of a high TF is that it makes a project less 'friendly' in multiple project scenarios, even if you run modest cache and Resource Share settings. Anyone who has run the ultra tight deadline tasks at MW knows all about that! ;-)

Alinator

iiiimmmmmmmmmmm a dumbass....

Naw, you're just a little impatient. Getting the whole picture takes time, and a bit of work. We all shoot from the hip sometime.

lol.

BOINC is being a little wonky. I'm trying to cut down on how often I use the network, I monitor the different graphs and enable network communication when it's low, but BOINC wants to do it other times.

What I do, is to help the Replica DB catch up, is I let the tasks upload, and then report/update twice a week. Well, after all of the uploads, it tries to update, even if I keep the network comms disabled the entire time.

This is as designed. If BOINC can talk to the network, it's going to do everything it can. Reporting is good -- and the replica is current last I checked.

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I let Boinc do its thing. When a work unit is done i let boinc call it in. To save up a bunch of work units to report could run you into problems Of geting rid of them. I hated the no upload stuff we have gone through not to long ago.
Me Id say get them back homne as fast as boinc will take them.

And i will be shutting the i7 down shortly. ran out of AP and seeing as I have to work tonight, no use leaving this computer on. Another computer getting a well earned rest.

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[/quote]

Old James

Might as well take advantage of the downtime and do maintenence on them while they're resting.

Then they'll be ready for a full scale assault on getting your RAC back up to where it was. ;-)

Alinator

...
However, when the resolution of the analysis got doubled recently, a side effect was the TF also doubled since the deadlines stayed the same.
...
Alinator

Deadlines doubled along with estimates and work, hence 'Tightness Factor' wasn't affected by that change. One very minor exception was that prior to the change Very High Angle Range 'shorties' had an exact 7 day deadline because the splitter has that as a floor, after the change 'shorties' have the calculated 13d18h16m40s.

                                                                  Joe

...
However, when the resolution of the analysis got doubled recently, a side effect was the TF also doubled since the deadlines stayed the same.
...
Alinator

Deadlines doubled along with estimates and work, hence 'Tightness Factor' wasn't affected by that change. One very minor exception was that prior to the change Very High Angle Range 'shorties' had an exact 7 day deadline because the splitter has that as a floor, after the change 'shorties' have the calculated 13d18h16m40s.

                                                                  Joe

My bad, and I stand corrected. ;-)

I stopped my in depth data logging at the beginning of the summer, and only gave a cursory look at the deadlines online when the change was made. Must have been looking at the wrong tasks when I drew that conclusion. :-O

Alinator

Might as well take advantage of the downtime and do maintenence on them while they're resting.

Then they'll be ready for a full scale assault on getting your RAC back up to where it was. ;-)

Alinator

That is so true. Blow out the old cobwebs and stuff:) But i have also just set NNT and cleaned out my fans evry now and then anyway.

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[/quote]

Old James

Agreed, but just to elaborate on your comments about the deadlines a bit.

It's not so much how long the deadline is in absolute terms, but what I like to refer to as the 'Tightness Factor' of the deadline.

IOWs the ratio of how long the task will actually take compared to the time allowed to run by the deadline.

IIRC, with the last deadline settings made, shorties are actually a litter higher TF than the longer deadline tasks in MB.

Another effect of a high TF is that it makes a project less 'friendly' in multiple project scenarios, even if you run modest cache and Resource Share setting. Anyone who has run the ultra tight deadline tasks at MW knows all about that! ;-)

Alinator

All true.

I think it's a mix of "tightness factor" and maybe "dedication factor" -- you need to take the tightness factor, which is relative to performance, and the "dedication factor" which is a whole mess of things like what happens if the owner goes on vacation, do they shut down on Friday night and start over on Monday morning, etc.

But the other part of my comment is that a deadline that is a minute too short has a bigger impact than a deadline that is way too long.

... especially when we're talking about catching exceptions.

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If the resolution was doubled, does that mean we have to do the old ones over again?

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30+ Computers heading our way! Currently at the "Zomg we need to talk to our tech expert at the co-op about this first!!!" stage. 16 Lab machines and 14+ Staff machines each with 2.2Ghz CPUs and 256MB ram. Think they balance? The RAM certainly is bad

In theory, there might be some benefit to rerunning the old data whith the new apps or split settings. Back when he original Enhanced app and then MB first came out they did just that.

However, I don't think they've have considered that option for a while, except for 'tapes' which failed to completely split succcessfully for one reason or another.

That might be changing, if the fresh data sitch from Arecibo doesn't improve some.

Alinator

nothing uploading or reporting,,,, its 4:56 EST

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nothing uploading or reporting,,,, its 4:56 EST

Internet link is running at 95%, flat out.

So the new work must have arrived, new work units for all, as long as you can get them.

But uploads will probably be a bit patchy for a day or so.

Ian

For "a bit patchy" read "Totally stalled".

I've been getting the same error message (give or take the times and back-offs)
09/09/2009 10:45:44 SETI@home Started upload of "wu id"
09/09/2009 10:46:54 SETI@home Temporarily failed upload of 31jl09ad.4673.3339.16.10.53_1_0: transient upload error
09/09/2009 10:46:54 SETI@home Backing off 2 hr 10 min 19 sec on upload of 31jl09ad.4673.3339.16.10.53_1_0
since 8amBST.
I've more results to dispatch now than I had then...

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

More like Catch22
for days - no work
Now - work available
BUT ya can;t get it 'cause ya can't upload.

Patience everybody...

More like Catch22
for days - no work
Now - work available
BUT ya can;t get it 'cause ya can't upload.

I got some! GPUs no longer idle...for now. If the uploads stay stalled I won't be able to download more...