When these and possibly other factors are taken into account, most people conclude that volunteer computing for climate simulation is acceptable from an environmental point of view. Better than playing a computer game ...

This absolutely a correct explanation.

Hi Ralf

One problem with what you said:

On one side, the scripts that create the XML files for the stats sites (BOINCStats, FreeDC, etc) are sometimes not running at all or as in this incident, are in fact running and updating with the huge loss of credits all the sudden, when it would have been better to stop those in this case.

The project has been running on the slave server while the master server is being fixed.
This slave server isn't up to date with everything, so data from the backup system needs to be added into it. Including credits.
As there are no up-to-date credits, there's no need for the scripts to be run. So they haven't been.
What got out to the stat sites was what was in the export-file part of the slave server. Which was a lower number than on the master server.

... distributed projects need to respect those people that are donating their CPU time with all associated expenditure.

No idea how to do that more than is being done already.

A few credits have gone missing for a few days, so what.

As long as its only credits it does not matter they can be regenerated again when all the equipment is up and running.

The important thing is that hopefully no returned work was lost, if that happens then we have got to recrunch it again. that would mean delays for whatever else is in the queue.

Nothing works perfectly all the time, life would be no fun if it did:-)

---

Kevin

And now Australia has lost mobile services from it's main telco.
This is one comment:

Unacceptable Telstra - I am being forced to talk to my children by this outage and read a book - A BOOK

Losing a few credits for a few days pales into insignificance. :)

(And without my wifi-to-mobile gadget, I was forced to wait while several zips uploaded from other computers before I could use the slow old landline to look at the 'net.)

Thanks for the encouraging words, Bob and Kevin.

Bob
I notice that you've been here slightly longer than me. Nice to see people sticking with it.

Unbelievable how people get their panties in a bunch over a small hiccup. Freakin disgraceful. They should be ashamed.

Guess what, computers break, stuff happens, and it's going to be fixed. Just calm down.

Keep up the good work Mods, Admins, researchers and anyone else involved in the project.

EDIT: I cant fathom how people are whining over 20k points, I lost like 500k, it will be back eventually.

Finrond wrote:

Keep up the good work Mods, Admins, researchers and anyone else involved in the project...

+1

---

+1

And I would guess, probably the majority of those responsible for the hundreds of views this post has had.

Hello friends, seems like some of us are having a similar outcome here

Ever since about a week or two ago I have showed 0 work contributed in total and 0 RAC. Before that i was sitting at 15,000 RAC and a few hundred thousand total credits. I have steady been doing work the entire time and still nothing is changing. I checked on all sides and my CPID is correct so im not sure what else to check for. I also am unable to create a new thread and get that error. I may end up stopping climate prediction for now and come back to it in a week or two and see if things are fixed.

Be good to keep crunching - Andy knows about the new threads problem and will be working on it as soon as he gets time. There have been previous problems with credits here but they have always been resolved. As noted below/above depending on how you view the boards work was going to start today on resolving the credits problem once the urgent batch of work was all in the queue to download. I have no reason to believe that work hasn't started and once the main database has been restored and things aren't working from the slave all should be back to normal.

Hi, Les
Although I'm quite an ancient cruncher, https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/cert1.php starting crunching with a 200 Mhz computer, I'm a recent Boing participant, mainly since CERN went to shared computation.
By the way, hey have huge problems too, with atlas@home providing faulty work units that never end, wasting participant's CPU and GPU computation time.

You said: "In the absence of CPDN, some equivalent models would be run by academic institutions on conventional computers, most likely consuming energy at such a rate that wasteful cooling is necessary."

Boinc French team members advocated that the Brit government reduced research credits and thus, CPDN needs more participants' help and understanding. That's a good argumentation.

You said: "When these and possibly other factors are taken into account, most people conclude that volunteer computing for climate simulation is acceptable from an environmental point of view. Better than playing a computer game ..."

On my side, I allow myself to let computers on 24h/24h since I changed all my home lights for Leds. And I only play online Chess 10' each player games.

I had a message overnight from Andy asking if I could see changes yet, but I had to say no.
So he IS working on it.

And his original message was that he wouldn't be able to START until Wednesday.
Nothing about about how long it would take.

tferr

There's a post here in News and Announcements 2 about what has happened.

Like all others in this thread my credits are messed up, 100k short, etc. I'm also not worried about it, seems the servers are down from time to time, anyway this episode isn't nearly as "traumatic" as the outage last fall.

One peculiarity this time is the way credits are "mixed up" among computers. Probably just due to using old data, in which case it will be rectified once things are running normally. Is there a forecast when that will be?

Another thing I've noticed recently is my Linux box episodically rebooting, annoying because Wine/boinc/CPDN doesn't restart automatically, at least I've not been able to get it to do so. I've wondered if some of the unstable CPDN tasks have contributed to these crashes. I'm inclined to think it's more likely a hardware-related issue though not yet been able to pin it down.

The tasks keep chugging along, trickles are uploading so the work is getting done. Looking forward to the moment the credits are finally updated, I'm sure the numbers will be impressive.

I'm inclined to think it's more likely a hardware-related issue though not yet been able to pin it down.

Between my three linux machines running boinc on wine at the moment, I haven't had any crashes yet. Am inclined to think you are right and it probably is hardware.

I have yet to try it but this claims it is possible. http://askubuntu.com/questions/476034/how-to-enable-an-application-to-run-at-ubuntu-start-up-which-is-installed-using

Edit: First try using those instructions didn't work!

2nd Edit:works as long as you can type accurately, I typed lower case "H" for?Home!

Between my three linux machines running boinc on wine at the moment, I haven't had any crashes yet. Am inclined to think you are right and it probably is hardware.

So many candidates, disks, video card, motherboard itself, hard to know where to start. One of these days I'll have to swap out components, maybe get some clues.

2nd Edit:works as long as you can type accurately, I typed lower case "H" for?Home!

Thanks for the tip! Yes it does work but not quite so simply. I had to make some modifications, and used this invocation:

/bin/sh -c 'sudo pkill boinc; exec wine "/home/jra/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/BOINC/boincmgr.exe" '

I ran into the problem that if tasks are running when a crash occurs, then on reboot the session manager automatically restarts the tasks. The resumed tasks prevent boincmgr.exe from making connection to the local client, causing boincmgr to error out. Terminating boinc tasks with pkill before calling boincmgr allows it to run normally.

BTW I'm running Ubuntu 15.10 with XFCE. The startup apps are set in the "Session and Startup" dialog. Took a few tries but finally got it right. Thanks again for your help!

Unbelievable how people get their panties in a bunch over a small hiccup. Freakin disgraceful. They should be ashamed.
Guess what, computers break, stuff happens, and it's going to be fixed. Just calm down.

Ah, a lessons giver.
Computer failures are one thing, another is getting negative instead of positive numbers; that's more probably human mistake or misprogramming.

EDIT: I cant fathom how people are whining over 20k points, I lost like 500k, it will be back eventually.

That happened hours after I did intentionally scupper a second 100k points CPDN account that will never be credited, except to a now ghost account that I'll ask to some CPDN admin to delete when not buzy at more important task. I like better a clean Boinc account with less points than a messy one.
If I was only to cumulate points, I would run only einstein@home that would bring me about 15 to 20k points per 24 hours, the best can my two PCs.

---

nonononotme said:

... that's more probably human mistake or misprogramming.

How it happened is a few kilometres down this thread, in my post here

I am noticing that some friends have their numbers back and are getting credit again but mine still has not changed. Wasnt sure if it was an all or nothing process or if it needs to be fixed user by user. Or perhaps some users just didnt have any problems at all. I did see that credit scripts should be fixed now, is anyone aware of what could still be causing the problem?

Thanks for the help

Hi tfer

No change in mine yet.
I sent an email early morning yesterday, UK time.

The way "credits" work here, is that there aren't any. It's all based on the trickle_up files that get returned all through the processing of a model.

Once every <N>, a series of scripts are run, one after another. The first goes through all of the <possibly millions> of trickle_up files stored on the server, and multiply each one by an amount that was decided some time ago. This total is added together in several ways:
One for each model, which goes into each model's page in each persons account
One for the total for each computer in each persons account
One for each person
One for each team associated with each person
And one for the total for each team.

All of this info is then stored in 2 places on the server (main and backup), in a form that the external stats sites can get to.

All of this takes a large part of a day to complete.
When it works.
And I suspect that parts of it haven't worked over the weekend.

Thank you for the information. I am still completing work units daily and wasnt seeing anything so I was a little worried. I will give it some more time and see how it goes