Lately, I have been receiving a whole lot of tasks with "(0.208 CPUs + 1 NVIDIA GPU)" in the task status. What is this task actually doing ? There is no graphics to represent for these task types, and I can't see mention of them anywhere. Thanks!

In your BOINC Manager's preferences, the bit about "On multiprocessor systems, use at most", will probably be set to 100% of the processor, change this to 87.5% to free up a CPU core just feed the GPU or you may find your PC becoming unresponsive and run times will be much longer for the other tasks.

Those tasks are OpenCL based GPU apps and ATM the SoG is the most efficient app, but they really need the support of a full core and not just that small portion of ;-)

Cheers.

Hard to say what you are looking at.

First question, are you using the simple view of BOINC or the advance view? You can change how boinc looks by clicking on view and changing it to advance.

In the advance view, you should now get more information about what the work units. You should see the name of the work unit. Some look like this

12mr07aa.18845.6616.10.37.147

Others look like

blc04_2bit_guppi_57903_47627_HIP9480_0004.12978.818.23.46.38.vlar

lastly there are

ap_09ja07aa_B6_P1_00155_20171211_15502.wu

Those are the 3 type of work units that are sent out. Once you tell us which ones you are seeing, we can tell you what they are.

As far as Wiggo's suggestion. You only need to reduce the "use at most" if you are experiencing lagging or slowing of responsiveness of your system.

Let us know how it goes.

Z

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Thanks for response.

Zalster, this task type, you can't click on "Show Graphics" for the task in the Task List (advanced view), it is greyed out.

The naming convention for one example item is blc04_2bit_guppi_.....[etc]...vlar_0

I do however see other "blc04_2bit*" tasks, however, the other tasks do have running graphics, so it's not the task type that doesn't have running graphics evidently..

In the advanced view, next to the text in the status column where it says "Running", it shows the text as in the subject line for this thread (0.208 CPU ...etc.) The interesting thing is about these tasks is that they are much shorter than usual tasks and can complete in roughly 30 minutes.

Here is the result of one of those work units:
https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/result.php?resultid=6227890419

I see you are running a GTX750 - if the task you are looking at, or trying to see the graphics for, are running on that then you won't see any graphics as there aren't any in the application.
I the advanced view you will see a column to do with the processor usage, tasks which are running on the GTX750 (or scheduled to run on it) will have something like "0.1 CPU plus 1nVidia GPU".

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

Oh I see, so it's a standard task, similar to all the others, just that task is allocated 20% of a CPU core to run the task, and the rest of the task is calculated by the GPU. Hence the relatively quick time to run through all the math. Having one CPU core with 80% of that CPU free is good because running other less CPU intensive tasks, such as working on a Word document, are doable in the background.

Thanks all.

That's a GPU task, so there aren't any graphics.
The "x% CPU" isn't a real value, its a very rough guide, at times there real usage may be near zero or near 100% so the current advise is to "free up" a CPU core to make sure that the GPU has decent access to the CPU without having to wait for other tasks to move out of the way. In the advanced view go to options, then computing options and set the "use at most xx% of CPUs" to something like 87.5 (you may have to try 87 or 88, I can't remember which one works) - you should see a reduction from 8 CPU tasks running to 7 when this takes effect (almost instantly on closing the tab box). Don't worry about loosing one CPU thread, the gain from the 750 will more than make up for it.

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

I seem to have it down pat now.

One thing I've noticed today, is that the task 'valid' count is decreasing. This morning it was at 98, then it was 95, then it went back to 97 and dropped again to 95. Now it's dropped to 81. I also had a task that had an error in it a while ago, and that's disappeared.

Is there a reason why task data is being removed ? I hope it's not because all the work my machine is putting in is being disposed of ?

Thanks.

I seem to have it down pat now.

One thing I've noticed today, is that the task 'valid' count is decreasing. This morning it was at 98, then it was 95, then it went back to 97 and dropped again to 95. Now it's dropped to 81. I also had a task that had an error in it a while ago, and that's disappeared.

Is there a reason why task data is being removed ? I hope it's not because all the work my machine is putting in is being disposed of ?

Thanks.

Completed tasks, once validated, are removed from the lists in 24hrs usually. ;-)

Cheers.

Is there a reason why task data is being removed ?

Yep.
Once the validated result has been moved to the Science database, it is removed from the Main database.

The Seti servers have been having some problems lately, and as a result the number of Valids is about double what it usually is. I've presently got about 1765. Usually around 800 (700-900).

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Grant
Darwin NT