Isn't it surprising that the available tasks queue is not reducing more quickly? I imagine that a lot volunteers either suspended CPDN or set 'no new tasks' when we were having lots of problems and haven't bothered to reset their account.

I'm probably not the only one who has thought of this but just wondered if CPDN couldn't email all active accounts with a gentle reminder that lots of tasks are awaiting their attention.

Shoot me down in flames if this is impossible /impracticable /already tried.

David

You are right about people suspending CPDN, at least I did so. Reason being that I do not have a very powerful computer and with 4 tasks running, there is no room for tasks from other programs. I rediscovered QMC@Home and am now happily running their tasks (each good for 50 hours or so). But I do intend to resume the CPDN tasks as soon as the problems are fixed. I know that getting credits is not the important thing here, but we are only human, isn't that so?

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It's primarily because the number of tasks created was so large, it has immediately swamped the pool of available computers. And there are still tasks being added - it has gone up by 1000 or so since yesterday.

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I'm a volunteer and my views are my own.
News and Announcements and FAQ

... but just wondered if CPDN couldn't email all active accounts with a gentle reminder that lots of tasks are awaiting their attention.

An all-active-CPDN-email-accounts message was tried years ago. Once. Oxford found itself listed as a spammer; university IT department folks, and higher, were not pleased. Be very surprised if CPDN staff ever tries it again.

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

Relax, I for one am very happy to have a big supply for WU�s ready to download. This constantly wondering if there will be any new work when your models finish is a little wearing. If only there were an equal supply of regional models.

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Isn't it surprising that the available tasks queue is not reducing more quickly? I imagine that a lot volunteers either suspended CPDN or set 'no new tasks' when we were having lots of problems and haven't bothered to reset their account.
David

I think part of the answer may be the credit addicts who have suspended CPDN and are waiting for it to start crediting before rejoining. These users tend to have the most powerful systems so the loss of one is disproportionate.

Imagine CPDN was a car, no matter how much you loved it there would come a point when all the niggling faults became too much and you'd be down the dealers looking for the best deal.

BTW There are several in the BOINC tables around me that picked up credits on 17/8, but only on that day. Any relevance?

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Prior to the debacle of the 19th century industrial revolution, Earth�s ecology had been an object of particular admiration for commentators in the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy .

I am with Jim on this one. My dual core atom is just waiting for some regional models to snap up. It takes a looooonnnnngggg time to get through a full resolution ocean model! So is crunching for WCG till there are some more.

...BTW There are several in the BOINC tables around me that picked up credits on 17/8, but only on that day. Any relevance?

I believe that this was residual credit calculated on the 30th July (just before the old server went bang), which got exported for the first time when the credit export process was turned back on.

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I'm a volunteer and my views are my own.
News and Announcements and FAQ

Drat! I thought it may have been the vital clue that everybody had overlooked :-(

Still going but the system seems to be doing CPDN work as an aside to other tasks.

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Prior to the debacle of the 19th century industrial revolution, Earth�s ecology had been an object of particular admiration for commentators in the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy .

...BTW There are several in the BOINC tables around me that picked up credits on 17/8, but only on that day. Any relevance?

I believe that this was residual credit calculated on the 30th July (just before the old server went bang), which got exported for the first time when the credit export process was turned back on.

Yep, In my statistics there is a large jump, but I believe it was the 18th, the day I got back home and turned on my home computer, which had been turned off for several weeks.

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I have moved the virtualisation posts into a new thread:
http://climateapps2.oerc.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/forum_thread.php?id=7660

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I'm a volunteer and my views are my own.
News and Announcements and FAQ

... but just wondered if CPDN couldn't email all active accounts with a gentle reminder that lots of tasks are awaiting their attention.

An all-active-CPDN-email-accounts message was tried years ago. Once. Oxford found itself listed as a spammer; university IT department folks, and higher, were not pleased. Be very surprised if CPDN staff ever tries it again.

I don't know how it works from the project side, but they could try using the BOINC Notices tab...
I also think that the project warnings/news posted in the "News and Announcements" thread should appear there.

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Professor Desty Nova
Researching Karma the Hard Way

... but just wondered if CPDN couldn't email all active accounts with a gentle reminder that lots of tasks are awaiting their attention.

An all-active-CPDN-email-accounts message was tried years ago. Once. Oxford found itself listed as a spammer; university IT department folks, and higher, were not pleased. Be very surprised if CPDN staff ever tries it again.

I don't know how it works from the project side, but they could try using the BOINC Notices tab...
I also think that the project warnings/news posted in the "News and Announcements" thread should appear there.

That will have to wait until they can switch the whole project over to a newer version of the BOINC server code - I think that work is proceding in the background, but it's a big job.

For any admins watching - you won't have come across 'notices' yet - the minimum server version is SVN [22543], committed 17 October 2010. See http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/ProjectNotices

I'm probably not the only one who has thought of this but just wondered if CPDN couldn't email all active accounts with a gentle reminder that lots of tasks are awaiting their attention.

For users new to BOINC, this sounds like a good idea, but for users of BOINC who have used it a long time, this would get old quickly - so I could see the possibility of some people complaining of spam.

BOINC was designed to be a background type of program making use of spare CPU cycles. Ideally, BOINC should go out and scout for more work if it's available instead of the user going out and finding work to run.

You may want to run the BOINC manager on your desktop for a little while to see what's happening. You'll note that if you leave the settings turned-on for your copy of BOINC to check for tasks, it should find something if there is WUs to do, and if there isn't, it will try again a little later.

In summary, just leave it turned-on to look for more WUs, and BOINC should take care of itself.

Isn't it surprising that the available tasks queue is not reducing more quickly? I imagine that a lot volunteers either suspended CPDN or set 'no new tasks' when we were having lots of problems and haven't bothered to reset their account.

I'm probably not the only one who has thought of this but just wondered if CPDN couldn't email all active accounts with a gentle reminder that lots of tasks are awaiting their attention.

Shoot me down in flames if this is impossible /impracticable /already tried.

David

I look in from time to time to see if they have fixed the various issues. Credit doesn't concern me. I was reluctant to do the RAPIT models because they take so long and a prone to crashing. My preferences are for the regional models, but there were none to be had. I have allowed RAPIT's for a while but when the regional models return I will amend preferences again.

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BOINC blog

I'm probably not the only one who has thought of this but just wondered if CPDN couldn't email all active accounts with a gentle reminder that lots of tasks are awaiting their attention.

Somewhere else on this board it was recently posted that this had been tried in the past which resulted in oxford.ac.uk being deemed a spammer. The powers that be were not best pleased it seems. It was also said in that post that it was unlikely to be tried again!

Isn't it surprising that the available tasks queue is not reducing more quickly? I imagine that a lot volunteers either suspended CPDN or set 'no new tasks' when we were having lots of problems and haven't bothered to reset their account. ~ David

I guess I was one of those, I didn't have the patience to monitor what was going on from day to day. Great that everything is settling down again - there's work to do!
Anyway, I now have three models in my task box, though I do rest one or two of them for other projects for the occasional challenge.
My old desktop was getting a bit slow compared with most users and I just defragged the hard drive to death but ... there's a new powerful desktop on my shopping list for the next month and I can almost hear the revving noises adready! /pg