Over a week more and no further updates. Is it time to write off Einstein @ Home and sign up for other projects? The Einstein @ Home web site has had no updates in two weeks.

A little information from the project staff would be appreciated. Failing to keep people informed is a good way to chase off dedicated donors.

--Bill

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A little information from the project staff would be appreciated. Failing to keep people informed is a good way to chase off dedicated donors.

Bernd had written something on their forums, about an hour before their present database maintenance outage. If you are such a dedficated 'donor', you may look further than the RSS feed and the front page, you can also check their forums for updates.

At this moment it looks like the whole site is down again. Then again, who can be expected to go to work when snowed/iced in? Or is no one following the weather problems in the USA anymore?

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Dunno about weather problems!! It's beautifully warm and sunny here where I am :).

The reason you can't get to the website at the moment is that the drought is over (almost) :). About 2 hours ago reporting of results started to succeed and about 30 mins after that, new release work and new executables started downloading. As all the boxes out there started awakening, the load on the server has obviously gone through the roof and you can't get to the website at the moment. However, my boxes are gradually succeeding in reporting their results and downloading all the new stuff. It's probably going to take quite a while for everything to sort itself out. :).

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Cheers,
Gary.

Ah yes, they are back he says... that's why I am not deferring for 1 hour this time, but 24 hours. ;-)

18/01/2007 13:34:38|Einstein@Home|Deferring communication for 1 days 0 hr 0 min 0 sec
18/01/2007 13:34:38|Einstein@Home|Reason: 3 consecutive failures fetching scheduler list


Just rattling your cage, Gary.

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Well then, news updates:

Old post by Bernd:

This is a short status update. All of us have been quite busy, as you probably can imagine, trying to fix all kinds of problems, and we still are.

- Today we generated the last Workunit of S5R1. All that remains to do of that run is to crunch the remaining Workunits that are already in the database and for which no canonical result has been found yet.

[edit:] - There are probably only a small number of tasks remaining for every frequency band, which causes hosts to download a new datafile for almost each task. Dial-Up users may want to suspend the project for the next few days.

- A lot of problems we had recently, in particular the database problems, seem to have come mostly from the fact that near the end of S5R1 much more short Workunits were left, so they came in at a much higher rate than we expected. With the end of S5R1, things should be back to normal again.

- We are currently testing the setup for a new run that will look again into a smaller frequency range of the current S5R1 dataset with modified parameters (spindown and mismatch). We hope to start distributing this new workunits in the next days, so there should not be much of a gap to the S5R1 run. This run will last 2-3 months. It will consist of only one type of workunits that are a bit more than half as long as the S5R1 long ones have been.

I hope to have time to post some more info here as soon as it becomes available.

BM

Latest post by Bernd:

- We have started distributing Work of a run called S5RI this morning
- Lasting longer than the short Workunits of S5R1 this will lower the load on our database server, so things should go back to a more or less normal state from now (and already are...)

Actually the situation went pretty bad because of a number of issues that happened at the very same time:

- hardware problems with the fileserver, causing delayed and thus accumulated reports
- S5R1 was coming to an end, with almost only short workunits left
- faster machines have been added after X-Mas :-)
- Bruce was (and in some sense still is) moving with his family from Milwaukee to Hannover, which means that everything at UWM was on David's shoulders
- currently due to the storm warnings in Germany facilities are shutting down and people are sent home, so we'll see how things go today

BM

As for that storm in the last line, we currently have a force 10 storm raging over the Northern part of Europe. With wind speeds of over 80mph. Just for information.

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Ah yes, they are back he says... that's why I am not deferring for 1 hour this time, but 24 hours. ;-)

Most excellent news. Here in the western US, where it is clear, sunny but a trifle chilly, we are waking up and finding new work units to download for Einstein. Glad to see things are working once again. Let's hope for a long period of stable operation.

--Bill

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