While poking through my pending credit I found a WU that was sent to another account's computer for validation on Dec 24th. When I checked that computer I found probably hundreds of WU's that were delivered to that computer on Dec 24th. I'm not sure how many because I gave up trying to scroll through them all. There has been no contact with that computer since Dec 24th. I have no idea how many of my pending credits are bogged down with this one computer but I suspect there are many more like this out there. Fortunately it appears that most of the WU's that I did scroll through will be timing out in the next few days. I can only hope they will be passed on to a wingman that is still supporting the project.

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Par for the course. The project cranks on. Although most WU's are returned within 10 days (grata the max buffer value), some take considerably longer, especially if a machine dies.

Byt rest assured, all wingman Wu's eventually either return, error out, abort, or time out ...., and are routed accordingly.

I understand that they will eventually timeout but it appears this computer was only on that one day, got nearly 1000 WUs, errored out on less than 20 then he/she gave up. Seems like the neighborly thing to do would have been to abort the WU's to turn them back for someone else to work on rather than tie 900+ of them up for over a month.

Now that I go that out of my system... It's possible the 'puter simply died a firey death and there was no way for he owner to return the unused WUs.

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I understand that they will eventually timeout but it appears this computer was only on that one day, got nearly 1000 WUs, errored out on less than 20 then he/she gave up. Seems like the neighborly thing to do would have been to abort the WU's to turn them back for someone else to work on rather than tie 900+ of them up for over a month.

Now that I go that out of my system... It's possible the 'puter simply died a firey death and there was no way for he owner to return the unused WUs.

You're also assuming that the owner knows that someone is anxiously awaiting the results so they'll get their credit.

If it's a new computer and a new cruncher, they're probably blissfully unaware of that.

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People & their machines come and go. Especially in this day and age of virtual machines and provisioned corporate OS images.

It would be nice:
-- If new machines accounts were on probation for a month and would only be issued WU's with 7 day deadlines. That would wean out the impact of hoppers much more quickly.
-- If Boinc uninstall did an elegant project unsubscribe to permit WU's to be re-issued in advance of their time-outs.

But none of that will happen, so we live with the typical 8 week time-out duration. It stopped bothering me once I bought a CUDA card and had more pending units than I could wave a stick at.

It would be nice:
-- If new machines accounts were on probation for a month and would only be issued WU's with 7 day deadlines. That would wean out the impact of hoppers much more quickly.

I've been thinking that a new machine should initially have a quota of 1 work unit per core per day.

That way, a quad-core would get four work units, finish those four, and return them.

Each time work is returned, the quota is doubled.

That'd give the new cruncher a good quota if they return work promptly while limiting the amount lost if a brand new cruncher gets a ton of work and then quits.

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Or, give the guy that put the money into that new number cruncher a break and just say only one outstanding task per core at a time. For each one you return you can get another one. Let that ride for a while until you have some number of returned valid tasks. Then bump up the limit a bit until some other threshold has been reached. That way you don't completely hamstring someone that's really interested in testing out that new box they just invested in. Gives them enough work to make sure the system is really working. If it's a real cruncher it shouldn't take too long for them to reach that threshold and start getting work before it's needed.

Edit: Sorry Ned... I got wrapped up in this and just realized that I essentially posed the same suggestion as you had.

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Each time work is returned, the quota is doubled.

I like it, do both methods ;-) Earn the priv to burn.

I need to look at the quota code some day, but I know the "Maximum daily WU quota per CPU" of 100 sure doesn't kick in ;-)

Each time work is returned, the quota is doubled.

I like it, do both methods ;-) Earn the priv to burn.

I need to look at the quota code some day, but I know the "Maximum daily WU quota per CPU" of 100 sure doesn't kick in ;-)

or have an option for impatient people to only process tasks that need to be validated.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

Talk about pending credit...I have 12,000 more pending today than I did last night. At least the bounce should be pretty good. They all pay off in the end, but the 1200 RAC drop sucks............

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Official Abuser of Boinc Buttons...
And no good credit hound!

Same here looks like the unforseen outage and lack of work yesterday has played havoc.
RAC's have dropped slightly but they will recover.

Dave

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I also had a bunch of pendings from around the 23rd to 26th of December. I blame Santa Claus!! :-) Crunchers get their new toys for Christmas, shut down the old clunker and away they go with their shiny new toy, forgetting all about us poor wingmen stuck with our same old machines and no one backing us up.

I agree with something said earlier, BOINC needs an elegant way to leave. Just a button to hit before you do the uninstall releasing all your work. I got hit by the detach on an old slow machine I was running. I tried to do the right thing but I forgot to reattach it long enough to free up the detached WUs on it. Luckily there were only about 6 WUs on it so it didn't hurt too much.

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PROUD MEMBER OF Team Starfire World BOINC

I have ~16,600 pending credits, a horrible amount of 'validation inconclusives', usually if my co-cruncher uses enhanced 6.09/cuda23.
IMHO this is one reason why there is so much pending credit atm.

Regards
Carlo

Confession time...

I took a look at my own In Progress tasks and found a bunch of them from Dec 30. These are not showing up in my client. I don't recall detaching from SETI or doing a clean install or any of those things that may create orphan tasks but maybe I did. So, to keep myself honest, I'm part of the problem here.

It would be nice if we could abort our tasks from our task list here on SETI. I'd be perfectly happy to clean up my own mess if there was a way to do it.

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Confession time...

I took a look at my own In Progress tasks and found a bunch of them from Dec 30. These are not showing up in my client. I don't recall detaching from SETI or doing a clean install or any of those things that may create orphan tasks but maybe I did. So, to keep myself honest, I'm part of the problem here.

It would be nice if we could abort our tasks from our task list here on SETI. I'd be perfectly happy to clean up my own mess if there was a way to do it.

There is a way, but if it's only a few tasks or if the deadlines are only a few days away, it's more trouble than it's worth.
You can run your cache down to zero, detach from Seti, then re-attach, that will free up the old tasks.
If you do this, and if you run optimized apps, you have to re-install them after you re-attach.

-Dave

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Or, give the guy that put the money into that new number cruncher a break and just say only one outstanding task per core at a time.

<snip>

Edit: Sorry Ned... I got wrapped up in this and just realized that I essentially posed the same suggestion as you had.

No worries.

We do tend to lose sight of one very important point, however:

Most participants at SETI@Home are crunching on what they have, they do not go out and buy computers just to crunch.

They also don't visit the forums, and definitely do not post.

I'm not saying that we should ignore those people entirely, just that we're assuming that every cruncher is like the average forum participant, and they are most definitely not.

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The overall pending credit seems to be dropping slowly but steadily -- it was at 5.5 million yesterday and now is down to 5.1 million. But mine keeps increasing -- I'm at nearly 60,000 now.

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Each time work is returned, the quota is doubled.

or have an option for impatient people to only process tasks that need to be validated.

That one gets my vote.

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Grant
Darwin NT

This is now at 4.8 mil.

Or have an option for impatient people to only process tasks that need to be validated

Gets my vote to

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Seems there's quite a few folks like myself waiting for a pot-load of work to be validated. I'm not going to knock the process (S@H) but in reading through the forums, from what I gather, the Home Offices' approach seems a little disjointed. I'm sure I'll gain a better understanding of the big picture as I progress but God, with astronomical amount of comp time/crunching being expended there has to be a better way to streamline and speed up the process...Meanwhile, the wingmen as far as I can tell have flown south for the winter...and ET sits back in his recliner, smoking a cig and thinking "you've got to be kidding!"

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