Ricochet (Jun 02 2011)

Long time no speak. I've been out of town and/or busy and/or admittedly falling out of the habit of posting to the forums.

So I was gone last week (camping in various remote corners of Utah, mostly) and like clockwork a lot of server problems hit the fan once I was out of contact. Among other things, the raw data storage server died (but has since been recovered), oscar wedged up for no reason (a power cycle fixed that) and Jeff's desktop had some issues as well (nothing a replacement power supply couldn't handle).

Then we had the holiday weekend of course, but we all returned here yesterday and continued handling the fallout from all that, as well as the usual weekly outage stuff. We're still using thumper as the active raw data storage server and worf is now where we're keeping the science backups. Basically they switched roles for the time being, until we let this all incubate and decide what to do next, if anything.

This morning we brought the projects down to replace some DIMMs (the have been sending complaints to the OS) on thumper. One thing I kinda loathe about professional computing in general is poor documentation - a problem compounded by chronic zero-index vs. one-index confusion, and physical hardware labels vs. how they are depicted in the software. Long story short despite all kinds of effort to determine exactly which DIMMs were broken, it wasn't until after we did the surgery and brought everything back on line that we found out we probably replaced the wrong ones. Oops. We'll have to do this again sometime soon.

There are some broken astropulse results clogging one of the validators (which is why it shows up on red on the status page). We'll have to figure out an automated way to detect these results and push them through (it's a real pain to do by hand). In the meantime, this is causing our workunit storage server to be quite full, and might hamper other workunit development sooner than later.

Gripes and server issues aside, there is continuing happy progress. I'm still tinkering with visualization stuff for web based analysis of our candidates (for private and potential public use), and we have tons of data from the Kepler mission arriving here any day now which will be fun to play with.

- Matt

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-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

Thank you for once again informing us of the trials and tribulations in the Seti server closet.
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"Ask not, what your kitty can do for you. Ask what you can do for your kitty."

As it is kitten, so shall it be done.

Thank you for the news Matt! We love hearing what goes on at your end. The new data from the Kepler mission sounds very interesting.

Steve
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Warning, addicted to SETI crunching!
Crunching as a member of GPU Users Group.
GPUUG Website

Thanks for the update Matt,

Claggy

I'm beginning to learn how to read your news with a British accent using Rowan Atkinson's voice as I read it.

Certainly makes things far more entertaining and a right bit hilarious as I read about the server issues. Hope you don't mind at all.

Thanks for the update Matt.

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Thanks Matt.

Maybe I should ask this in Number Crunching... I looked at my new machine's BOINC manager yesterday for the first time since the day I installed it, I think. Almost half of the tasks listed on the tasks tab had a status of "GPU missing; Ready to run." None of them showed any progress. Does this mean the computer's GPU failed? Obviously, I'm still getting video output. The card is an nvidia GT 440 (not the latest and greatest, but adequate to my primary need). I restarted the computer a couple of times while I was messing with it and did not check the BOINC manager again, so maybe it recovered and I don't know it. I have different preferences for this machine to allow it to use most of its potential, whereas I restrict my others a bit for their overall health and performance of other apps.

David

A few things to work on, now that the major fires have been stomped out:

1) The "client connection stats" page hasn't been updated since before the big black-out last year.

2) The "Multi-Beam Data Recorder Status" shows "34206m ago" - that's ~ 24 days...

These assume, of course that the BOINC server software hasn't been changed so that they are unavailable. Also, if the "Pending Credit" page is permanently gone, could someone delete the link?
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1) The "client connection stats" page hasn't been updated since before the big black-out last year.

2) The "Multi-Beam Data Recorder Status" shows "34206m ago" - that's ~ 24 days...

Also, if the "Pending Credit" page is permanently gone, could someone delete the link?

Also, if the "Pending Credit" page is permanently gone, could someone delete the link?

Wait... what's the situation here (I have zero pending credit, so the page link works - it just says pending credit: 0.00 and shows no tasks)?

- Matt

Also, if the "Pending Credit" page is permanently gone, could someone delete the link?

Wait... what's the situation here (I have zero pending credit, so the page link works - it just says pending credit: 0.00 and shows no tasks)?

- Matt

How does BOINC decide what to work on, anyway? I see it nearly finished with tasks that are due in a month and a half, while others that are due in a week aren't started.

David

1) The "client connection stats" page hasn't been updated since before the big black-out last year.

For some reason this is a big pain to keep working (and obviously low priority to keep kicking back into working mode). Will try to look into that again soon.

2) The "Multi-Beam Data Recorder Status" shows "34206m ago" - that's ~ 24 days...

Oh yeah that. There was a cluster of power/security concern issues at Arecibo a few weeks back and lots of things haven't been adjusted to work with new networking/security regimes yet. So we haven't gotten telescope info up here in real time for a while, hence the big delays.. Also will look into that again soon.

[[snip]
- Matt