1) Message boards : Number crunching : Astropulse V6 estimates four times too long. (Message 1246165) Posted 14 Jun 2012 by ChiTownDale Post: Your experience is different from mine with Astropulse WU's. I'm currently processing two WU's and they are different from each other as night is to day. On one of the WU's it is running maybe 15-20% less hours than the original download's estimate. They both estimated about 65 hours or so. It has clocked 24Hrs 50Min and indicates there are about 33Hrs 50Min of processing left. So it looks like it will take less than 59Hrs to complete the WU. The other one is quite a different story. It has already clocked 67Hrs 40Min of CPU time and shows that there are still 78Hrs 30 Min left to process BUT the amount of time remaining to process the WU is continuing to INCREASE, not decrease just as it has done since the WU was downloaded since it has already used more than the original estimate of 65Hrs to complete the WU. It can't be due to one WU getting more CPU time than the others since I run a dual processor plus a GPU on my display board which processes all of the SETI WU's that can be processed by a GPU processor. So while one has an estimate that may come out using 10-15% less CPU time than estimated, the other one will end up using far in excess of 225% of the original estimate, assuming it actually completes the WU by 4:24 PM on 6/23/12, which is now only 9 days from now. As long as the estimated time required continues to increase instead of decreasing, likelihood that it will actually complete its task gets dimmer and dimmer since at this moment it has already used 2.82 days of CPU time over the past couple of weeks (after all, I do use my computer for more than just processing SETI WU's) and with 3.27 days of CPU time needed to complete the WU and that amount increasing steadily, it is obvious that there is astrong possibility that it nay never complete this task at all. After all, I do also process data for ClimatePredict and those WU's usually require between 190-350 hours of CPU time but they allow me as much as a year to complete one WU so I can SUSPEND processing for months at a time while processing other BOINC projects that have more immediate deadlines to be met. In addition, ClimatePredict grants credit for the portion of a WU that is completed as that portion is reported on an interim bases because they require so much CPU time to complete and even partially completed WU's have some value to their overall projects. I don't know if that is true with Astropulse WU's but if they are going to use over 100 hours of CPU time they really should grant credit for large enough segments of the WU that are completed particularly since the number of weeks granted to complete each WU is such a small fraction of the time ClimatePredict allows for completion of a WU yet apparently for at least some of Astropulse's WU's require nearly as many hours of CPU as ClimatePredict's do.

2) Message boards : Number crunching : Why classic SETI@home is closing down and other facts of life. (Message 212003) Posted 12 Dec 2005 by ChiTownDale Post: "Refreshing your memory on Classic in 1999. Go read some yourself." Ah, but the difference is that when we were doing SETI work in 1999, many of us had the equivalent of Model T Fords for computers so the outages you cited were hardly noticed, if they were noticed at all. I know that they were transparent to me since I just had SETI running in the background and didn't notice when it was waiting for an upload or download slot at all. Plus, now with BOINC, it is far more noticable since if you are running multiple applications and it backs up you see this list of pending up/down loads piling up. Also, even with multiple BOINC applications, if the distribution is bottled up you end up with a bunch of applications all waiting for some work to do. I know I am now running SETI, Rosetta, Climateprediction, Einstein and LHC and yet they are all idle waiting for some data to work on. I'm debating about running Wold Community Grid as well since it has no distribution problems currently. I hate having my two PC's sitting around rwiddling their thumbs when I am not using them. Such a waste of CPU time, and when I get the third machine working I will have even more idle time to donate.

3) Message boards : Number crunching : Why classic SETI@home is closing down and other facts of life. (Message 211982) Posted 12 Dec 2005 by ChiTownDale Post: After running SETI for years and accumulating over 36,600 hours of computing time, I have a pretty dumb question. If there is no bandwidth to upload and sownload actual work, then why is there plenty of bandwidth to post messages like this and make inquiries as to personal and overall SETI progress? After all, bandwidth is bandwidth. If Boinc is bottled up, why can't SETI divert to its own servers? It is all well and good to use BOINC as its main distribution method, but having a backup seems like a wise thing to do. Just as important systems have emergency power backup for times when they may have a power failure,it would seem that SETI ought to be able to maintain an emergency alternate server path for when BINC gets swamped. After all, I am writing to a SETI server right this minute, which could easily be diverted to service uploads and downloads when this happens. Perhaps I am looking at things in an overly simplistic fashion. Just a thought.

 
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