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Thread 'no new work units'

Message boards : Number crunching : no new work units
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dennis9999

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Message 61496 - Posted: 8 Nov 2019, 17:08:54 UTC

I have not received any new work units since July of this year. The last activity in my account were 3 or 4 unit that erred out and I received partial credit.
Why no new work units?

Dennis
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Les Bayliss
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Message 61497 - Posted: 8 Nov 2019, 18:03:13 UTC - in response to Message 61496.  

Answered in several threads over the last few weeks.

Why no new projects to run?

And in this thread, which is a mixture of Why none? alternating with More now.
New work

For Windows work, there's a "window of opportunity" which lasts for around 30 to 90 minutes, because of the huge numbers of Windows machines waiting for work.
Then it's back to waiting for a few weeks.
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dennis9999

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Message 61500 - Posted: 8 Nov 2019, 22:13:34 UTC - in response to Message 61497.  

Thank you Les I will just have to be patient.

Dennis
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marmot

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Message 61501 - Posted: 9 Nov 2019, 0:20:57 UTC - in response to Message 61497.  
Last modified: 9 Nov 2019, 0:25:10 UTC



For Windows work, there's a "window of opportunity" which lasts for around 30 to 90 minutes, because of the huge numbers of Windows machines waiting for work.
Then it's back to waiting for a few weeks.


So we need to have a machine that has no work units running at all, CPDN the only project accepting work and set to only request particular WU's to have a shot at WU's we've personally never crunched before.

Even if I use 0 resource share on all the other projects and there is 1 WU running per core, and no WU's in queue; BOINC slows the request for work down to every 60 minutes even though it's set to additional 0.01 days of work (which should equate to every 14 minutes and appears to be the smallest increment BOINC accepts in that field).
I've played with leaving 1 or 2 of 8 cores open and the request rate is still slowed but maybe my brain is misremembering that test. I should try it again and see if the requests are every 14-15 minutes with 2 cores always open (only possible on a project with server controlled number of WU's downloaded).
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Les Bayliss
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Message 61503 - Posted: 9 Nov 2019, 2:42:36 UTC - in response to Message 61501.  

The facility to select particular work types was dropped with the server upgrade a couple of months ago.
Now computers will get whatever is available for their OS.

The back off between work requests is 1 hour and a couple of minutes.
This is to slow down faulty computers from requesting more work to kill, too soon after the last time.

Otherwise you've got it about right.
Request work in the short time that some is available, and hope that everyone else is distracted just then.

*************
Too many Windows computers - too few researchers using a model type that has a Windows app.

*************
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ed2353

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Message 61505 - Posted: 9 Nov 2019, 10:22:50 UTC - in response to Message 61501.  

"even though it's set to additional 0.01 days of work (which should equate to every 14 minutes and appears to be the smallest increment BOINC accepts in that field)."

I thought that "set to additional days work" (actually "Store additional Days work" in my BOINC manager version), enabled you to download and store additional work units for your computer to crunch on future days.

Surely it has nothing to do with how frequently the requests for work are made - which is controlled by CPDN, not the BOINC Manager, to no more frequently that one hour as Les pointed out.
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mikey

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Message 61524 - Posted: 11 Nov 2019, 14:47:16 UTC - in response to Message 61503.  

The facility to select particular work types was dropped with the server upgrade a couple of months ago.
Now computers will get whatever is available for their OS.

The back off between work requests is 1 hour and a couple of minutes.
This is to slow down faulty computers from requesting more work to kill, too soon after the last time.

Otherwise you've got it about right.
Request work in the short time that some is available, and hope that everyone else is distracted just then.

*************
Too many Windows computers - too few researchers using a model type that has a Windows app.

*************


Is there a way to do this on the users end thru a config file? Right now you only have two kinds of workunits available, one that takes an average of 147 hours and one that takes an average of 337 hours that's a huge difference especially if your pc is older and doesn't run in the 3 or 4 ghz range for speed.
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Jean-David Beyer

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Message 61525 - Posted: 11 Nov 2019, 15:48:09 UTC - in response to Message 61524.  

Right now you only have two kinds of workunits available, one that takes an average of 147 hours and one that takes an average of 337 hours that's a huge difference especially if your pc is older and doesn't run in the 3 or 4 ghz range for speed.


On my slow machine, 1256552, the N144 work units are taking about 16 days each, and the N216 work units are taking about 22 days. Machine running 24/7, and not doing much else except web browsing and e-mail. I am currently running four N216 work units.

CPU type 	GenuineIntel Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2603 0 @ 1.80GHz [Family 6 Model 45 Stepping 7]
Number of processors 	4
Operating System 	Linux 2.6.32-754.23.1.el6.x86_64
BOINC version 	        7.2.33
Memory 	       15.5 GB
Cache 	      10240 KB
Swap space     3.91 GB
Total disk space 	117.21 GB
Free Disk Space 	 97.36 GB
Measured floating point speed 	1.27 billion ops/sec
Measured integer speed 	        3.53 billion ops/sec
Average upload rate 	    1394.09 KB/sec
Average download rate 	   10519.69 KB/sec
Average turnaround time 	18.94 days

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Les Bayliss
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Message 61527 - Posted: 13 Nov 2019, 18:07:43 UTC - in response to Message 61524.  

Is there a way to do this on the users end thru a config file?

No, there isn't.

The project is slowly moving into a new phase, of bigger, higher resolution models.
Those from the old days with slow computers, will get slowly left behind.
But with so many new people, with big, many core computers joining up, work will gradually move to them as others give up.

And the new models seem to need around 4 Megs of L3 cache, or they slow waaaaaaay down.

*****************

As for Windows work, it seems that the best way to get some on the infrequent occasions that some shows up, is to not have your computer fully loaded with work from other projects.,
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Jean-David Beyer

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Message 61531 - Posted: 14 Nov 2019, 5:46:08 UTC - in response to Message 61527.  

the new models seem to need around 4 Megs of L3 cache, or they slow waaaaaaay down.


Hurray! My slow (1.8GHz) 4-core 64-bit processor has 10240 Megs of L3 cache.
And now I have 16GBytes of DDR3 registered RAM in eight 2 GByte modules.
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marmot

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Message 61588 - Posted: 21 Nov 2019, 8:17:05 UTC - in response to Message 61505.  

"even though it's set to additional 0.01 days of work (which should equate to every 14 minutes and appears to be the smallest increment BOINC accepts in that field)."

I thought that "set to additional days work" (actually "Store additional Days work" in my BOINC manager version), enabled you to download and store additional work units for your computer to crunch on future days.

Surely it has nothing to do with how frequently the requests for work are made - which is controlled by CPDN, not the BOINC Manager, to no more frequently that one hour as Les pointed out.



I asked at the main BOINC forums how to get boinc.exe to request tasks at it's fastest rate and setting additional work to 0.01 was the response. You can check the forums; you'll likely find my handle 'marmot' in the search.

Other settings to increase frequency of requests was to exert control over the work cache to limit WU's to very few in number such as setting resource share to 0 on each project (some don't accept less than 1, some projects are still so aggressive their WU's dominate all other projects vying for spots) and, for project with newer BOINC server software, and the options implemented, explicitly setting number of downloaded WU's.

Local app_config.xml settings of <max_concurrent> or ,project_max_concurrent> aren't reported to the server and can worsen cache flow as the project sends enough work to fill all available cores yet only gets to run the max_concurrent number at once. Resource share 0 can be a crucial supplement to max_concurrent settings when you are assigning cores to multiple projects.
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