some action over at LHC@Home Classic (SixTrack)

[Assimilator1]

Thanks, maybe I should give it a go now .

And yea thanks giving is a US only hol AFAIK.

[update]
Ok got some WUs now (long compared to A@H! - hmm, early estimates were way out).
So what's this round of WUs we're crunching about then?

Btw just crunching with 2 cores of my Q9550 at, although if the A@H server problem continues it'll be all 4.

 

[Assimilator1]

......... Unfortunately, I don't think I'll keep running it much longer. The LHC app somehow manages to get my CPU up to 62 Celsius (which it really doesn't like) while other projects never push it any higher than 54 or 55. I'm not too worried about the temperature itself, but at 60+, the cooling fans run at max speed and they are really loud and annoying.

I've just added LHC to BOINC & it's decided to switch all 4 cores to it from Asteroids@home for now, temps have dropped by 3-4C! lol.

 

[Assimilator1]

Out of WUs already, blimey 12k WUs doesn't last long!

Btw is this - 'Workunits waiting for assimilation 9,137' the number of WUs to come?

 

[Sunny129]

Out of WUs already, blimey 12k WUs doesn't last long!

Btw is this - 'Workunits waiting for assimilation 9,137' the number of WUs to come?

no, i forget exactly what "Workunits waiting for assimilation" are, but they are different from "Workunits ready to send." i believe they're work units that have been processed but not yet validated.

anyways, yes, 12K WU's goes fast here at LHC@Home...as a matter of fact, the number of tasks ready to send made it as high as ~60K yesterday, and as you can see, they are all gone now...

 

[Assimilator1]

Wow!

Glad I added LHC the moment after I posted to your heads up!

Btw is there any site where they discuss upcoming WUs?
And what the recent WUs were about?

 

[Sunny129]

Wow!

Glad I added LHC the moment after I posted to your heads up!

Btw is there any site where they discuss upcoming WUs?
And what the recent WUs were about?

i would say the LHC@Home message boards is the best place to find that kind of information. once in a while a project admin will post about upcoming work, and only sometimes do they mention exactly when to expect it to go out and how much of it there is...but for the most part, small batches of work get sent out now and again without any announcement or heads-up. that's why most project participants know to never rely on a constant flow of work from the server, and set their BOINC clients' project priorities and work buffers accordingly. check the the news section of the LHC@H message boards - that's where you'll find updates that explain what certain batches of work achieved now and again...

 

[Assimilator1]

And funny you mention that as I was just checking that out early

Oh & I've just been able to grab about a dozen WUs , all but 1 of them are short (20+ mins), the other nearly 4hrs, & has a totally different name.

 

[Assimilator1]

Just grabbed 32 WUs, although most of them were short, going by eye about 2/3 of them had a runtime of less than 10s! lol.

Not very convenient they turned up in the middle of the F@H race

 

[Assimilator1]

Just restarted my CPU on BOINC & was pleasantly surprised to grab some LH WUs .
I guess most of you regular crunchers knew that anyway .

Some recent news :-

Status, 24th January, 2014
Hope this will answer some of your messages.

We still have some 34,000 WUs NOT being taken. We have apparently
almost 6000 in progress.

We introduced SixTrack Version 4.5.03 on Wednesday 22nd
January after extensive testing on boinctest and at CERN.
Unluckily Yuri flooded us with work at the same time
and AFS blew up leading to a huge backlog of over 16,000
results to be downloaded.

 

[Sunny129]

Some recent news :-

Status, 24th January, 2014
Hope this will answer some of your messages.

We still have some 34,000 WUs NOT being taken. We have apparently
almost 6000 in progress.

We introduced SixTrack Version 4.5.03 on Wednesday 22nd
January after extensive testing on boinctest and at CERN.
Unluckily Yuri flooded us with work at the same time
and AFS blew up leading to a huge backlog of over 16,000
results to be downloaded.

well yes, that has been in recent LHC@Home news. but i believe some, if not most, of the issues have been resolved, b/c all of my tasks are being validated, hundreds of them. plus everything looks good on the server status page.

 

[Assimilator1]

That's alright then , more what caught my eye was the number of WUs left to crunch, if I read the site correctly their are now 61k WUs ready to crunch! http://lhcathomeclassic.cern.ch/sixtrack/server_status.php

 

[Sunny129]

that is correct. usually the cache of "tasks ready to send" drains much quicker than it is draining right now, so my guess is that new work is still being generated, and that new work is being fed to hosts only slightly faster than the new work is being produced...or else the cache of "tasks ready to send" would disappear much sooner than it is at the current rate.

 

[Assimilator1]

Time to clock up lots of points!

 

[Assimilator1]

Got me some more WUs , grab 'em while you can!

 

[Sunny129]

46,073 tasks ready to send currently...get 'em while they're hot!

 

[Assimilator1]

Got 9 & crunching 3, burnt me fingers!

 

[Sunny129]

123,755 tasks ready to send!

 

[Assimilator1]

Tasks ready to send 166,468

They seem to have a lot atm!
I've suspended A@H for now as it wants to hog all the CPU time it seems! Despite being assigned less resources than LHC . I want give a LHC a good run.

I thought BOINC assigned CPU time to projects based on the expiry date of the WU, but it stubbornly let A@H crunch even though LHC had older WUs!
Any idea what's going on there?

 

[Sunny129]

I thought BOINC assigned CPU time to projects based on the expiry date of the WU, but it stubbornly let A@H crunch even though LHC had older WUs!
Any idea what's going on there?

yes and no...the short answer is that the code that is used to write the BOINC client/manager software is far less simple than its basic functions indicate. expiration date is but one of several factors that goes into the calculations that determine the priority of every task in your entire work buffer...so if you ever see tasks being crunched out of chronological order with respect to expiration dates, it is because that is not the only factor that plays into task priority.

at first i found these BOINC phenomena quite irritating, but i've since gotten used to them, and have since figured out ways around them. for instance, i used to set LHC@Home resource share higher than all other projects on a given host (via the BOINC manager) so that when LHC@Home tasks finally became available, my BOINC manager would suspend CPU tasks from other projects and start downloading and crunching LHC tasks. needless to say, BOINC never did behave the way i thought it would, and despite giving the LHC@Home project a higher BOINC resource share than any other project on that host, LHC tasks would not always download when they became available (in fact it rarely did)...and b/c LHC work is so rare, often times the "LHC tasks ready to send" would run out before my host would even start thinking about fetching any LHC work. so i don't do that anymore...i just give all project on a given host equal BOINC resource shares.

instead, what i do to get LHC work is i set all other projects to NNT (no new tasks) and up the size of my work buffer so that it fetches work from the only project not set to NNT, LHC@Home. if there's not much new work to be sent out, then i simply reduce my work buffer size again once i've reached the limit on LHC tasks in progress, and allow all other projects to fetch work again (because the server's new work buffer will probably run out before i finish crunching a substantial portion of the LHC tasks i just downloaded and need more). if there is a substantial new work buffer on the server, then i leave the other BOINC projects set to NNT and keep an eye on server's new work buffer so that i know when to reduce my host's work buffer and allow other projects to fetch new work again.

 

[Sunny129]

hi guys and gals...

LHC@Home currently has ~40K tasks "ready to send"

 

[petrusbroder]

Yeah, crunching some of them as we communicate ...

 

[Assimilator1]

Yea my client's grabbed some WUs this time
Even more WUs available now! 'Tasks ready to send 53,932'

Oh & thanks for the info on BOINC Sunny , don't know how I missed that reply earlier.
So what other factors are used to decide which project/WU to crunch?

 

[Sunny129]

Yea my client's grabbed some WUs this time
Even more WUs available now! 'Tasks ready to send 53,932'

Oh & thanks for the info on BOINC Sunny , don't know how I missed that reply earlier.
So what other factors are used to decide which project/WU to crunch?

well, i don't know exactly. i just know that the task deadline parameter isn't the only factor that goes into calculating crunching order, b/c i've seen (as have you) tasks with later deadlines being crunched before other tasks with nearer deadlines on numerous occasions.

basically what i think it boils down to is that the BOINC developers would like to maintain substantial control over how the BOINC client prioritizes individual tasks, thus minimizing the amount of human error caused by the manipulation of settings in the BOINC manager by uneducated users who think they know what they're doing, which in turn minimizes the overall number of errors caused by tasks not finishing by their deadlines...

 

[Assimilator1]

I've temporarily suspended A@H so I can crunch as much LHC as possible, will have to watch the client so it doesn't run idle!

Incidentally I've also noticed that when you stop/start the client (via exiting or suspending/unsuspending) it switches which projects it crunches! Earlier I suspended A@H (even though it wasn't crunching it at the time) with the intention of BOINC getting more LHC WUs, then I thought I ought to leave A@H on but set NNTs. However when I did that it stopped crunching LHC & crunched A@H instead on 'high priority'!! So I suspended it again , I'll start them again a couple of days before the deadline even if LHC still has WUs available.

 

[Sunny129]

yeah, basically it comes down to 1) a fair amount of BOINC manager manipulation until you can get the BOINC manager to do what you want it to do, and 2) some babysitting to make sure you don't miss deadlines/don't run a specific project's work buffer dry/etc.