These tasks have no corresponding workunit. Consequently, I cannot delete this dead host. I think these were really old HadSM3 models.

8633633
8527041

Could these be deleted?

Any host for which a Task was downloaded cannot be deleted, whether or not the Task was successfully completed.

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"We have met the enemy and he is us." -- Pogo
Greetings from coastal Washington state, the scenic US Pacific Northwest.

Yes, but periodically (once a year or so), the scientists will delete old workunits from the database once the data is analyzed. I deleted an old host earlier this year. These are orphaned tasks and are useless without their parent workunit.

The workunits those tasks come from will now be in the database archive. I don't think there's anything we can do about the orphaned tasks. At some point Milo may decide to delete old tasks from members' computer records.

I've just checked my own computer list and see that an old AMD which now has no tasks listed, though it did crunch as well as it could, can in fact be deleted. These even older tasks must have been purged during one of the database archiving exercises. So you may just have to wait another year or two. The programmers don't archive stuff very often as this exercise is very time-consuming and on both occasions has caused problems.

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Cpdn news

I have no idea if this is related, but for the last few days, my account has shown that I have three HADAM3P models in progress - not bad for a dual core processor. Unfortunately, only two show on the BOINC manager. How can I rid my account of the wastrel?

MW: Two possibilities: either you've set your Boinc Manager to show only Active tasks, so the one that's waiting to start doesn't show, or you've experienced the intermittent download glitch in which the server thinks it's allocated your PC a task, but for some reason the task never gets transmitted.

These extra non-existent tasks that show up on your account are known round here as "phantoms". Everyone gets a few sooner or later. I watched one download once: it got to about 90% and then just vanished. No files were left on my PC, but it was on my web page.

There's no way of getting phantoms off your account's list of tasks. Just wait till the report deadline passes. That's all we can do.

Ghosts are frequent in SETI@home. I asked the devs at Einstein why they are not seen in Einstein@home and they told me because of the "resend" feature used in Einstein.
Tullio

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Once when Carl was Chief Programmer he tried to make our BBC project credits transfer to our CPDN accounts. Boinc isn't built for this and the CPDN server didn't like it. Carl said he watched for 5 minutes while every model available for download drained off the server and as phantoms onto all the computers connected to the server at the time. One lady got over 1000. Her real models were on the very last page of her task list. I don't think she ever noticed.

Carl then spent a dreadful weekend cleaning up the mess and never tried again. That's why our BBC credits remained separate. The fact that Tolu managed to get our Beta project credits to transfer to our CPDN accounts is a miracle.

I know we all like to see beautiful task lists full of successes apart from the FAMOUS that crash because of PRESSURE or THETA. The phantoms spoil our excellent crunching records but at least they do no harm.

I get the impression that the admins from more projects than before are now complaining about phantoms.

I wonder how the Einstein resend feature works in preventing phantoms. Does this mean that if a task doesn't download successfully the Einstein server starts again?

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Cpdn news

I wonder how the Einstein resend feature works in preventing phantoms. Does this mean that if a task doesn't download successfully the Einstein server starts again?

The re-issue functionality is just a configuration-switch projects can enable, and the only disadvantage is added server-load. Many projects like Einstein, SIMAP, WCG and so on uses this functionality, and SETI@home atleast ocassionally uses it...


For each Scheduler-request, v4.45 and later clients includes a list of tasks currently assigned to client in this project.

Server-side, if project has enabled re-issue, every time user asks for more work, the Scheduling-server compares the client-list against the tasks the host has been assigned, and any tasks client should have but doesn't will be re-issued to client by server (or not re-assigned if too little time to deadline or wu errored-out or something).

Any tasks on client, or any reported as download-errors and so on, won't be re-issued.

So, the re-issue functionality only ** works against "ghost"-wu, in most instances this is clients that asks for work, server assigns some work but client doesn't get the reply, so client asks for more work again 1 minute later or something. So, instead of server assigning yet another task, instead the tasks client didn't get 1 minute before will be sent again.

There's limits of how much work can be issued in a single reply, so even if CPDN does enable this functionality, no-one will get 1000 re-issues to a single comuter, even they somehow does have so many current ghosts...



** If user does a reset, he'll not have any work on client, and if re-issue is enabled this will mean all his work will be re-issued. A detach/re-attach on the other hand will not re-issue any work, instead all work will be marked "detafched".

I have no idea if this is related, but for the last few days, my account has shown that I have three HADAM3P models in progress - not bad for a dual core processor. Unfortunately, only two show on the BOINC manager. How can I rid my account of the wastrel?

To answer directly, your circumstance is not related to my original post. There is no way for you to directly remove those "phantom" tasks.