Apologies if this has been asked before ... but how do you tell if a WU is Long or short?

398458464 95524288 19 Oct 2006 11:54:53 UTC (cpu time in seconds 56.63) (credit 0.04) = short


397042527 95182788 17 Oct 2006 4:51:53 UTC (cpu time in seconds 24,546.59) (credit 67.23) = long

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In reference to how long it would take to crunch it?

Well you dont really have a choice, but I think aborting simply slows down the crediting process for you and others. While also messing up the validation of the WU as well.

If its CPU usage your worried about, I am pretty sure unless you are trying to divide usage amongst many projects, that you can just let BOINC run and it wont interfere with anything you do. It is the lowest priority app in the system so it will automatically use any left over processing power or even stop working until you are finished with your work/play.

As far as time, its a matter of the angle, check out the BOINC Wiki by pressing the help button, tons of good stuff in there.

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Apologies if this has been asked before ... but how do you tell if a WU is Long or short?

You can't tell specifically, but you can check the "angle range" of the work unit by opening the work unit in a text file viewer or an editor, but be warned, DO NOT SAVE any work unit you open with an editor as it can cause corruption of the wu, even if you don't actually edit the file!
About fifteen or so lines down in the file will be a line which looks like:

<true_angle_range>0.4356485</true_angle_range>

The number in the middle is the "angle range" of the work unit. Crunch times are very short for high values and increase as the angle range decreases until you get to very low numbers such as 0.05 or so then they drop again very quickly. Angle ranges around 0.1 to 0.2 are the longest running. Angle ranges near the example I quoted above are considered "average" work units.

Please note that as the crunch times increase, so do the credits given. So you are not penalized for getting the "long" wu's nor rewarded for getting a "short" one.

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Jim

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Apologies if this has been asked before ... but how do you tell if a WU is Long or short?

It's not like Einstein, where there are just two sizes and a big gap in crunching time between them.

There's a wide range of crunch times here, and you could get almost any point between the extremes.

You can get a rough idea of how long Berkeley expects it to take by looking at the deadline they've assigned - the longer the WU, the later the deadline. There's a table in the sticky 'enhanced FAQ' thread which tells you how the ARs Jim mentioned relate to crunch times and deadlines.

The only thing you can't do is predict when a WU is going to abort itself after less than a minute, as in Sammie's example. Those are WUs which report a '-9 overflow' message, and are known as 'noisy' WUs. You get them once in a while (sometimes in batches) and you just crunch and move on.

ah! OK ... Thank you very much. I was in fact using the Einstein WU's as a template ....
Many thanks to all for the explanation.

Deadlines give it away here. If it's a 4 day deadline, it's a short one, if it's a 4 week deadline, it's a longer one.

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