While I love SETI, I don't mind downtime, as it just give World Community Grid more CPU cycles! I appreciate all that the SETI folks have done, and wish I was in a place to continue $$ support, but do have an idea I can afford to give!

As an only occasional visitor here, please forgive me if this has been considered but rejected...

It seems that some cloud provider would have some spare CPU cycles / bandwidth they could parse out to SETI without impacting paying customers, but could still legitimately be a tax write-off. Since much a SETI processing does not have to be real-time, off-peak processing would be fine. The bandwidth needed, while a significant added load to a University network, could possibly go basically unnoticed on some cloud networks (think Berkeley vs Google or Amazon).

There may be some issues in virtualizing the systems (they are Sun servers, yes?) but it seems that there must be an option...?

Has this been considered? Not feasible? No cloud providers willing?
What would it take to make this happen?

Rather similar to what IBM is already doing for World Community Grid; IBM provides the servers. Can you find some other cloud provider that is willing?

How much bandwidth would be needed to get the workunit files from the SETI@Home site to and from the cloud provider site?

Oh well, I opt out until it's fixed. At least I'll save on the electricity bill!

Funny, I recently resurrected my old May '99 account after I dumped SETI@home mid 2000's due to "Client Error","Client Error","Client Error",... every time I had completed work to report. I knew the problem wasn't on my end so after seven years the same problems persist? Go figure.

It's not right time to complain or doubt. It's time to encourage them or help them. If you feel there's problem, why not just go and help them? I think it is better cause I think SETI means something in your life since you come back to it after long 11 years. Besides, they don't take any money forcibly from us.

---

-----------------------------------------------
*ET come to Earth for touring
*ET drive UFOs for touring with various models(UFOs are ET's cars)
*ET left sigatures after tour, that's why Crop Circle shows up.

It's not right time to complain or doubt.

Bah! It's always the right time to complain and doubt. It's how the squaeky wheel gets greased. Now having said that, enough $10 buckets of grease would do the trick...

---

I got 12 tasks running and so far bunch more waiting to be crunched. I have communication deferred showing up, but I should have enough tasks to hold me off for a day or two.

---

Well, I am all caught up and no errors yet. Donation coming in a couple of days.

---

We are a land of sheep and dairy
Here to be fleeced and milked

I hope you will send out a NEWS item that appears in the BOINC NEWS tab when it gets fixed. I've Suspended the Project so it doesn't keep trying to access the servers.

---

To those of you having trouble you should come over to the Number crunching forum. You are more than welcome to start a thread and ask for help. Boinc options and settings can be a bit hectic, confusing or downright hidden. If you have found yourself without work units to crunch, chances are it could have been avoided. So come on over:)

To most of you posting in this thread, welcome to the boards!

And to those of you showing people the door, shame on you.

I will continue to wait for this downtime. Perhaps the scheduler server has just been up for too long. Maybe restarting would help. In all cases restarting can help a bit freeing up useless swap and main memory. The way I see it is that it hasn't been restarted in so long and huge amounts of RAM is being cluttered up. Just my suggestion. And will patiently wait

I will continue to wait for this downtime. Perhaps the scheduler server has just been up for too long. Maybe restarting would help. In all cases restarting can help a bit freeing up useless swap and main memory. The way I see it is that it hasn't been restarted in so long and huge amounts of RAM is being cluttered up. Just my suggestion. And will patiently wait

Whilst there has been no official announcement, the scheduler has been up for a little while now. Yesterday was the normal weekly outage, but I am getting tasks again now OK.

---

I'll have 8 task to go and then my seti guf is empty:(
Are there again problems??? What I don't understand is that
some users at Seti@Netherlands deliver more then 14000 task
work in 4 hours..then they get more then the 100 task a time
That is not honnestly against the other users if I may say.

Sorry just got 70 task;)

I wouldn't be surprised if those users are actually proxies
for large groups of computers not necessarily owned by just
one person, and they might provide ways to discuss SETI@Home
in Dutch and perhaps a few more languages other than English.

Also, the 7.0.* series of BOINC versions tends to ask for
workunits in larger batches than earlier versions, possibly
so that they can make such requests less often.

My systems started downloading again this morning. I've even got my old tasks running now, I had several short tasks which were seemingly being ignored by BOINC, it only seemed to process the new work units. But as a test of my system I turned on the GPU processing options and now the GPU is picking off these short tasks which I've had sitting around for over a week.

I was just about to consider re-installing boinc because I thought it must have a problem because it was ignoring all the short tasks in my cache. I've never had the GPU enabled before so wasn't expecting the work units to need to have GPU enabled as well as CPU for them to be executed.
I read now that the GPU units are downloaded first before any CPU ones, so my system seemed to be picking up the GPU units even though I hadn't enabled GPU before.

I have also at times noticed that in Windows 7 (64bit) in my case, that if it has any Important/recommended windows updates sitting in it's own queue ready to be installed, this seems to prevent BOINC from processing anything until those updates have installed, so perhaps some problems people are having might be windows updates getting in the way?

---

I had several short tasks which were seemingly being ignored by BOINC, it only seemed to process the new work units

Ordinary expected behavior from BOINC. It does things in the most illogical, to a human, order.

---

Big tip - don't let Windows update the driver for your GPU as doing so is known to be a source of great agro and grief.

---

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

Thanks Gary and Rob for your feedback.

So far all is working fine again, GPU has been a busy beaver working through all the small Work Units and CPU (3 out of 4 Cores active on Seti) has been working on the big ones.

cheers

---

The best place to start troubleshooting on the scheduler is what has changed since the last time it was up and running. Hardware, software patching, software update? And is your system producing a dump file of some kind. Check your logs and your dump file to see where the problem is happening and go from there.

Has the server gone down again? After 2 days of no problems I notice again that the updates of WU's and uploads of completed WU's as stalled

Rob

I belive someone is making some tests on diferent configurations the lab, now there are 7 MB/1 AP -Spliters working (producing a lot of WU ready to Send) but as espected (show by the cricket graph) the pipe reaches it´s full capacity, the last 2 days they only put about 4 or 5 Mb MB/1AP splitters to work and the pipe works fine with that.

---

It's great that folks are getting some processing time, but sadly all of my computers have all of their work "ready to report" and it has been that way for several days. I tried to force an update but got the same old "server not found, project may be down for maintenance" or something like that. I will patiently wait for you to fix remaining problems to be resolved. Maybe then Work Units will return to normal processing? It is my hope !!!

It's great that folks are getting some processing time, but sadly all of my computers have all of their work "ready to report" and it has been that way for several days. I tried to force an update but got the same old "server not found, project may be down for maintenance" or something like that. I will patiently wait for you to fix remaining problems to be resolved. Maybe then Work Units will return to normal processing? It is my hope !!!

There has been a notice on the front page since last Friday explaining the problem.
It is in fact still there now.

---