1)
Message boards :
Technical News :
Small Word (Sep 20 2007)
(Message 650837)
Posted 29 Sep 2007 by ![]() Post: @perryjay .. I'm far from coming up with a solution to your problem, but the reason (at least for Josh's machine not sending back the results to WUs from Aug-14) seems simple: IMO he experimented with WinVista - had problems and now runs his machines again with WinXP ;) Best would have been, if he cancelled the downloaded results before abandoning his WinVista-experience, but now it may be too late. :-( I also think that such abandoned machines/clients are most of the problem some users are getting annoyed by their pending credits (not because of credits but because of lagging results which blow up the database). This is not a specific WinVista-problem but a common problem with users trying to run BOINC or new/unknown BOINC-projects. A lot of people seem to try out CPDN - and then cancel the project because of the long running-times of a WU (or the requested HD-space). Did anyone hear from the team if the long duration for such partly abandoned WUs is _really_ an issue for the S@H-servers? Maybe the servers can get along easily with 2megs of open results. ;-) Right now my client was able to DL 3 WUs only after trying (only once manually triggered) for more than 30 minutes - such multi-requests are also something causing unneccessary load on the servers and network. When looking at the server-stats I think it's a problem of WU-creation: some weeks ago only 3-4 mb-splitters worked with 10-20 WUs/second creation, now 6 mb-splitters seem to create fewer WUs?? Regards, Chris P.S. Thanks to OzzFan and the others for their replies to my earlier post. If there were good reasons for abandoning RRI, I won't waste another minute on it (it's a smaller problem of the "pending credits" (better: unvalidated results) - results will only stay a bit (at most 24h) longer unvalidated). |
2)
Message boards :
Technical News :
Small Word (Sep 20 2007)
(Message 649926)
Posted 28 Sep 2007 by ![]() Post: I did not read the whole thread so I don't know if my arguments are "new": 1. Just now I have a "unusually" high pending credit (334), but ey: do we only crunch for credits? Just keep calm. I agree, those with faster or more machines or dedicated only to this project will have far more pending credit - but in the end all credits will be granted. 3 months ago when crunching only S@H I had a more or less stable pending credit around 550 - worth 24 hours of work - so I asume this was the statistical amount for everyone with an initial replication of 3 and a minimum quorum of 2. Now with an initial replication of 2 this might rise to 2 days. But again I say: keep calm, just wait and see, every credit will be granted sooner or later. There is only one point that needs to be considered here: a lot of unfinished WUs with pending credits may keep the database server too busy! 2. I'm also crunching for CPDN. One advantage for credit-crunchers: your credits are constantly updated with progress of the WU. But the WUs need far longer to finish. And because sometimes my disk space is very limited I was only able to really finish one WU completely. From the scientific point of view it is far more likely that something happens to the crunching machine so that it produces a wrong result in CPDN than in S@H. Nevertheless credits are granted for all calculations. I don't know if or even how they compare two completed results or how they use incomplete (but as they state on their website in some special instances nevertheless usefull) results. A lot of downloaded WUs at CPDN are never completed - but because of the constant granting of credits noone seems to complain about that fact. But to reduce this wasting of server power there is indeed a thread in the message board where people (dedicated crunchers) report clients that only download lots of WUs but return only errors. The admins analyze the clients behaviour and prevent them from further downloading WUs on the server site. 3. Quite a lot of users here especially those with long turnaround times have a unnecessary high WU-cache. Just now the first one I looked at in my "pending credits" has 54(!) WUs in cache with a turnaround-time of more than 8 days (on a P4 with 3 GHz (2 CPUs) and RAC=367). Why are users so "WU-hungry"? I admit, S@H had some outages this year - but why not use them to support other projects? The longest of them lasted longer than 10 days, so even such a cache does not prevent clients from "running dry". (I used the outage in April to attach to CPDN and later to QMC - in the end S@H lost more than 50% of my crunching power but the BOINC-community gained as a whole - its the science that counts!) If a machine with lots of WUs crashes the cashed WUs may be lost - so keep that in mind when "playing" with your cache settings. 4. Some users seem to run every machine they have. Sometimes its fun to read about "oldies" driven by Pentium60 or even 486DX processors in this forum. But let's be reasonable - apart from proving that it's possible to run this project on these clients, it's a great waste of energy! I don't understand users running those machines just to crunch some credits more. But users who still (have to) really _work_ on such machines have my full respect when they dedicate their spare power to BOINC. Maybe it is possible to send out the "smaller" WUs requiring only few crunching time (my WUs differ from less than 1 hour to more than 9 hours) to such clients when they request work so they can finish WUs in a reasonable time. 5. Finally: Isn't it possible to "play a bit" with the daily-WU-quota to prevent clients from caching to much WUs? As far as I remember (from CPDN?) you can finetune it in a way a client can only download e.g. double the WU it uploads a day. And what about taking the turn-around-time or "cached WUs" in account, too? Apart from that: a BOINC-wide limit for cache-settings (e.g. not more than 2 days) may solve this problem in an easy way (btw I use 0.5 days). While I'm at it: when a WU finishes (applies to all projects, not just S@H) the result is uploaded immediately but is reported only hours later when the client requests the next WUs (or I "Update" the project manually). I'm running BOINC as a service on WinXP with a seperate user-account. How can I get my client to report results immediately? I tried the "-return_results_immediately"-switch when starting boincmgr or restarting the service manually but with no effect. This could also help in returning results faster. Thanks in advance, Chris |
3)
Message boards :
Number crunching :
Validate Errors II
(Message 606373)
Posted 20 Jul 2007 by ![]() Post: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/workunit.php?wuid=142047896 Hi, this WU has no validate error but remarkable "Compute error"s. All 3 error-results were crunched by PowerMacs! The following "normal" results were produced by Intel/AMD-machines. Is there a bug in the PowerMac-Seti-app? Can we trust the other results? Greets from Germany |
4)
Message boards :
Technical News :
Can't talk.. Debugging.. (May 15 2007)
(Message 569978)
Posted 18 May 2007 by ![]() Post: Leaving it alone and letting BOINC do its thing is the best thing to do. Try restarting the BOINC manager - that helped me (and as I just realize I'm not the only one) some minutes ago after effortless trying to UL/DL results/new WUs for hours... Other BOINC projects are running smooth: why not give a chance to Proteins@home (small WUs which finish in 20% of the time SETI-WUs require) or climate-prediction (larger WUs which require 400x space and time!) - you don't have to run idle machines just because SETI is hickupping ;-) |
5)
Message boards :
Technical News :
Fast One (May 16 2007)
(Message 569960)
Posted 18 May 2007 by ![]() Post: Don't know if someone has been working on the system right now, but I got error-messages like Jaegermeister the last 8 or 9 hours (last successful contact was the upload of my last result around 18:15 UTC after trying to upload my last WU for 6 hours) ... ... until I restarted the BOINC manager a few minutes ago (another project could not connect to its server so I tried this) - and suddenly the results were accepted and I could download 3 fresh WUs!! So maybe restarting the BOINC manager could also help others - sometimes I have the impression the BOINC client can get a bit clobbered Thx for your work with the hickupping hardware and network ... |
6)
Questions and Answers :
Windows :
Which files to copy to new computer?
(Message 59310)
Posted 2 Jan 2005 by ![]() Post: After a new installation of WinXP on the same PC I installed BOINC and afterwards copied ALL files and subdirectories from the BOINC-Directory of the old WinXP Image-Backup (I recommend Acronis TrueImage because images can be linked as removable drives and searched in Windows Explorer). So even after changing CPU (from Athlon 1400 to Athlon XP1800) or RAM size or WinXP SP1 to WinXP SP2 and vice versa NO different client number was assigned. [Update:] And even when using Win98SE and WinXP simultanously on one PC it is possible to use the same installation of BOINC for these different systems (save All files of the first installation to overwrite the files after installation of the second Windows system in the same directory on a shared drive with same drive-letter). Surely it was easier to port workunits from one PC to another with the SETI@home classic client sometimes even without loosing partial computed workunits! Greetings from Germany Christian |
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