I recently switched to Ubuntu from a different Linux distro. After getting Boinc up and running again and successfully adding some projects, I am finding my tasks queue is completely empty.

I am in the projects "Asteroids@home", "RNA World", "Rosetta@Home", and "World Community Grid".

Upon clicking the update button and checking the event log, I see all four of them received zero new tasks. While I suppose this is theoretically possible, I find it hard to swallow that none of these four large projects have any work to do at all, especially since they said that a couple days ago as well.

My preferences are set to always compute, to use 20% of the CPUs available 100% of the time, and otherwise no settings are ticked that I know of which would cause this behavior. The only thing I can think of is that the partition Ubuntu is on is fairly small, but it still has 128 GB available, of which 100 are free for Boinc to use, so I doubt that is at issue. (If it is, I can simply resize the partition to be larger.)

Does anyone know what might cause this and how to obtain some tasks to begin crunching?


Boinc Version: 8.0.4

OS: Ubuntu 25.0

CPU: Intel i7-14700KF(28)

GPU: AMD ATI Radeon RX 7700 XT / 7800

Driver versions: Uncertain, but should be standard Intel/Mesa drivers obtainable from Apt, nothing fancy

Asteroids currently has 0, which happens every so often. (In practice, A@H will have work for several weeks, then will have 1-2 weeks of no work, then work again.)

Same with Rosetta.

I haven't yet looked at the server status pages for the other two projects you mentioned

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https://boinc.berkeley.edu/dl/

RNA World: 0 tasks to send

Having trouble finding the server status pages for WCG... they MIGHT be out of tasks for whatever subprojects you have selected, but it would be nice to check.

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https://boinc.berkeley.edu/dl/

RNA is dead. WCG has work. Check which apps you have selected there.
https://stats3.free-dc.org/stats.php?page=proj&proj=bwcg

Holy cow, they really don't have any work! I would never have guessed!

I just signed up for Science United, which hopefully will intelligently suggest projects that do indeed have work.

I won't touch SU with a barge pole preferring to have complete control over what tasks I run. CPDN has lots of tasks at the moment for Linux but you do need to install the required 32 bit libraries or they will all crash.

There are sporadically testing tasks for OIFS tasks that you have to opt into on the website that require 26GB RAM/task. Hopefully not too long till full sized batches of these appear.

I can understand why you wouldn't like Science United, but as someone who likes helping out with all the projects (especially when, as I learned today, sometimes if I want to focus on just one project it may be out of work!), it's a nice convenient way to do that. Maybe that makes me lazy or uncaring about what my cycles are going towards - but if there's a project I really don't like I can always disable it myself. (I care more about diseases and physics research and less about pure math crunching due to its generally lacking practical application, but I'm still not opposed to pure mathematics work... but I digress.) As it stands, WCG (albeit this time through SU) finally got me something to do, so I've been crunching for the past hour or so. Looks like I was just being a bit impatient.

I've never used SU, so take what I'm about to say as "someone that doesn't actually KNOW what he's talking about"...

I'm under the impression that when you sign up under SU, it's SU's id that's registered for each project. I like being able to post under my own 'name' on the message boards in case I have an issue with a task, or a setting where I'm not sure of what I'm doing.

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https://boinc.berkeley.edu/dl/

JLDun wrote:

I've never used SU, so take what I'm about to say as "someone that doesn't actually KNOW what he's talking about"...

I'm under the impression that when you sign up under SU, it's SU's id that's registered for each project. I like being able to post under my own 'name' on the message boards in case I have an issue with a task, or a setting where I'm not sure of what I'm doing.

You are absolutely correct about not having your own account at the projects and because of this, you don't receive the credit for tasks completed/validated under Science United.

I feel inclined to say "Credit, shmedit!" but given that it apparently can be important for troubleshooting as well, I decided to remove myself from Science United and sign up for my desired projects by hand instead. Thanks for the info!

In reply to nbfields's message of 10 Aug 2025:

it apparently can be important for troubleshooting as well,

Or task runtimes, if it strays 'too far' from expectations.

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https://boinc.berkeley.edu/dl/

I think Asteroids, Rosetta and WCG may be well zero. I've had a few WU's for the latter but it's been a bit patchy lately. I'm not on the RNA project

Rosetta and asteroids have been zero for some days.

Perhaps try einstein , milkyway or gaia (all @home). All have work units currently

In reply to jives11's message of 11 Aug 2025:

Rosetta and asteroids have been zero for some days.

Rosetta has been releasing work, but very, very small batches. A thousand here, 5 thousand there a few times a day.
Basically enough to keep systems that already have work going, but unless your systems requests work at just the right time (probably a 10 min, or less window) out of every 24hrs, you're out of luck in getting any.

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Grant
Darwin NT.

And CPDN still has a couple of thousand in the queue. With tasks lasting about 4 days on a fast machine running a single task, just over 5 for my Ryzen9 running 8, they are only being taken up slowly as crunchers finish the ones they are already running. (linux only at the moment.)