Multiple SETI@home tasks fighting for resources?

Questions and Answers : Preferences : Multiple SETI@home tasks fighting for resources?
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Blastdaddy
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Message 1326137 - Posted: 9 Jan 2013, 19:08:18 UTC

Installed BOINC and began running yesterday. The initial flood of downloads completed with some timeouts and tasks are running for SETI@home and AstroPulse. The AstroPulse tasks appear to be single threaded and run to completion in approx. 2.5 hrs. The non-AP tasks for SETI@home appear to be multi-threaded and 8 of them are currently running. They have all accrued 6 hrs plus of processing time with estimated time remaining at 3 hrs plus. But since the initial estimates were a little over 5 hrs each, I estimate another 8 - 10 hrs for completion of any of these tasks.

Is this normal? Is there anything I can do to speed completion of these tasks?

Since I have another 93 non-AP tasks waiting to run, it is unlikely that they will all be completed by their deadlines.
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Message 1326147 - Posted: 9 Jan 2013, 19:45:11 UTC

Not uncommon.
BONIC has to calibrate itself against your system. This takes about 20 tasks to be completed and validated for each type of workunit you are porcessing. During this time you can expect the initial guesstimate of execution time to be inaccurate.
Neither the AP and MB clients are multi threaded, but are capable of being run multiple times, generally once per CPU core. Thus on your 8 core system you can run a total of eight AP and MB tasks at a time.

With your system there should be no problems in completing your assigned tasks within their deadlines, SETI@Home is quite generous. Once running smoothly I would expect to see your CPU going through an "average" MB task in about two hours, which is the equivalent of one task every half hour.
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Message 1326350 - Posted: 10 Jan 2013, 13:39:12 UTC - in response to Message 1326137.  


AstroPulse tasks run longer than SETI@home Enhanced tasks if they are run on the same 'computing device'

You AstroPulse tasks are sent to be run on your GPU (AMD Radeon HD 6x00 series (Turks)), GPU is faster then the CPU so they compute in shorter time:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/results.php?hostid=6882244&offset=0&show_names=0&state=4&appid=12

If you ever get an AstroPulse task to be run on your CPU it will run for 20-30 h

Before you ask: SETI@home do not currently have 'standard' app to run SETI@home Enhanced tasks on ATI GPUs:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/apps.php


About deadlines:
Tasks have different run time depending on their content (e.g. VLAR run longer), you can see 6x difference:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/results.php?hostid=6882244&offset=0&show_names=0&state=4&appid=2

Lets say all your 100 "In progress SETI@home Enhanced tasks":
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/results.php?hostid=6882244&offset=0&show_names=0&state=1&appid=2

... will run the longest time: 36000 s = 10 h
100 tasks * 10 h = 1000 h

Your CPU can do 8 tasks simultaneously
So your CPU will need max 1000/8 = 125 h (~ 5 days)

You can see that:
100 tasks are not more than 5 days work for your CPU
The deadlines are >30 days


 


- ALF - "Find out what you don't do well ..... then don't do it!" :)
 
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Questions and Answers : Preferences : Multiple SETI@home tasks fighting for resources?


 
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