Credit and computation error

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susan

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Message 1029031 - Posted: 27 Aug 2010, 21:48:44 UTC

I am annoyed. After using many hours of my cpu time, there was a computational error ( not specified what it was) which means I dont get my 29,000 points or so of credit. Hello but this is twice seti, and I only got to know about the "error" after my pc had hosted the complete computation. My pc did nothing wrong.Nor did I I want my points!

Sue Jones
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Message 1029034 - Posted: 27 Aug 2010, 21:54:57 UTC - in response to Message 1029031.  
Last modified: 27 Aug 2010, 21:56:34 UTC

29,000 points? how do you figure that? you've had an astropulse Workunit fail your multibeam workunit is pending validation. I'd say that since your computer seems to restart a Workunit ever couple of percent that maybe you shouldnt run the Astropulse on your computer and just stick with the multibeam workunits. The miltibeam of yours that errored out is a result overflow. this means it got to many signals. This may be true or your computer may have a glitch thats occasionally giving out errors

You can ask to not receive astropulse in your Serti@home preferences on your account page. This may solve a problem or 2


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Profile Jord
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Message 1029039 - Posted: 27 Aug 2010, 22:17:34 UTC

There is a bug in BOINC 6.10.58, where when you use the screen saver and have the preference "Suspend work if CPU usage is above X%" at the default 25%, that the screen saver program is seen as a non_BOINC application and that BOINC will be suspended due to the screen saver program taking up that many CPU cycles.

Set this preference to zero (0 or ---). Mind, if you use local advanced preferences, you will have to set it there.

This bug has been fixed in the next BOINC version.

As for the credits, you seem to confuse the run time with the amount of credits. Your Astropulse took slightly over 92,000 seconds to run before it crashed with a shared memory failure on the graphics (screen saver). You will not get paid 1 credit for each second you run tasks, but instead get credit set by the server, but based on the amount of floating point operations your CPU has done on the task, multiplied by a set value (I forget what it is at the moment).

And you will only get credit after your task has been returned correctly (no computation error) by your computer plus the second computer doing the same task. The contents of the task result will be checked and if they are the same between the two computers, credit will be granted.

By the way, you can check what kind of error your tasks have. When you click the Task ID link, you'll see what BOINC reported back to the server on that task of yours. BOINC itself will also (usually) give a line in the messages showing what the error was. But since these errors are then still numbers, it may still not make sense. Which is why there's the BOINC FAQs which show a lot of these errors with an explanation. (Not exactly on the error -202 you got on the Astropulse, but by reading through the rest of the stderr.txt some of us helping here can figure out pretty much what caused the problem).
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Joseph Rome

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Message 1035821 - Posted: 24 Sep 2010, 22:52:40 UTC - in response to Message 1029039.  

My computer has been sitting here for two days without work, and I know there was a planed outage. The uploads should be given a time close to when you plan to run again so this modem (DSL) stop "pinging" the net.
You should be able also to inform us when the next work unit will be sent out.

This only seems right.

Joe Rome-Austin, Texas
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Message 1035831 - Posted: 24 Sep 2010, 23:14:43 UTC - in response to Message 1035821.  

The uploads should be given a time close to when you plan to run again so this modem (DSL) stop "pinging" the net.

If Seti is your only project, set your Network Activity to Suspend, then the uploads stop trying to upload.

If you have other projects as well, then it's a bit of tough luck.
By the way, your (A)DSL modem will always ping the net, for as long as it's on. But that aside.

You should be able also to inform us when the next work unit will be sent out.

They already do that, by telling us each Tuesday that there is a 3 day data distribution outage starting, which means that Tuesday morning Berkeley time (California) everything will go off line, while sometime during Friday morning Berkeley time (California), things will start to be put in motion again.

A more exact time isn't possible.
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Tambi2

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Message 1038476 - Posted: 2 Oct 2010, 23:43:28 UTC

After the week or so of SETI being down, noticed a lot of missing finished work units, but the main problem seems to be that two astropulse units which took me aprox. 28 hours each to process around 9/16 now say timed out! Does anyone know what happened, or should I just wait for it to come out in the wash?
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John McLeod VII
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Message 1038559 - Posted: 3 Oct 2010, 3:30:58 UTC - in response to Message 1038476.  

After the week or so of SETI being down, noticed a lot of missing finished work units, but the main problem seems to be that two astropulse units which took me aprox. 28 hours each to process around 9/16 now say timed out! Does anyone know what happened, or should I just wait for it to come out in the wash?

Where does it say timed out?


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Tambi2

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Message 1038771 - Posted: 3 Oct 2010, 20:02:46 UTC - in response to Message 1038559.  

Hello John, thanks for replying. Under "your results" "All tasks for Tambi2)
WU in question are as follow: Astropulse 646744654 and 646744606.
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John McLeod VII
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Message 1039323 - Posted: 8 Oct 2010, 1:23:43 UTC - in response to Message 1038771.  

Hello John, thanks for replying. Under "your results" "All tasks for Tambi2)
WU in question are as follow: Astropulse 646744654 and 646744606.

OK, that would most likely be because the servers have been down. There have also been a rather large number of "ghost WUs" that have been assigned and not actually delivered to a client.


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Questions and Answers : Web site : Credit and computation error


 
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