I have a problem with BOINC (GridRepublic and Primegrid) I set the times in 'preferences' and get tasks that are impossible to complete in the allowed time, could the 'preferences' - 'processor usage' input form be more like :

[img] http://www.computours.org/boinc/boinc.png [/img]

Please?

Then the manager could more accurately accept or reject tasks.

Thanks for listening

You mustn't insert blank spaces between BBCode tags ;-)

Thanks, therefore ;

I have a problem with BOINC (GridRepublic and Primegrid) I set the times in 'preferences' and get tasks that are impossible to complete in the allowed time, could the 'preferences' - 'processor usage' input form be more like :



Please?

Then the manager could more accurately accept or reject tasks.

Thanks for listening

I set the times in 'preferences' and get tasks that are impossible to complete in the allowed time

First off, what times do you set here and what are your settings for the Minimum Work Buffer and Maximum Additional Work Buffer in the Network tab?

Then, how it works there:
You set two times for BOINC to do work, between the hours of X and Y.
In the Day-of-the-Week Override, you set per day between what other hours BOINC should do work. These are two very normal 24 hour blocks divided by a hyphen.

Example Given, you set BOINC to do work between 21:00 and 07:00, but for on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, then the override times should be 22:00 and 08:00. That's:
√ Wednesday 22:00-08:00
√ Thursday 22:00-08:00
√ Friday 22:00-08:00


It's quite counterintuitive to add whole or broken times, such as 7.75h, as no one does that for their override or alarm.

And then for being able to crunch all work within the allotted time, my computer runs BOINC every day between the hours of 22:00 and 06:00, with a cache of 1 day minimum and 0.5 days additional. It runs work on 3 CPUs (of 4), plus a GPU. It manages to finish all work before the deadline.

There are even whole days on end that BOINC gets only 2 hours or so to do work, because I am gaming, and days that the computer isn't on --at all. It still finishes all work in time. So if your BOINC can't, you either have very strict time set that BOINC can do work, or a cache that's too large to begin with.

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It's that annoying little frog again, sorry

"First off, what times do you set here and what are your settings for the Minimum Work Buffer and Maximum Additional Work Buffer in the Network tab?" all set to zero '0'

Then I've set 15:30-16:00 then in days of the week I've set 08:00-15:30 for Monday to Friday left blank Saturday and Sunday because I don't work weekends.

7.75h as an estimation by a user of how many hours the machine will be available to BOINC is quite a sound basic way for informing the BOINC controller of how many hours a computer is likely to be available on any particular day, obviously it should be limited to two decimal place, clever idiots who input numbers like '0.616666666' should be blocked.

Another strange thing :





As you can see from the time stamp of the screenshots (top right hand corner) the remaining time and percentage of work done goes the wrong way sometimes.

Am I missing the point? What happens when I want to use the computer for and extra hour or two outside the FIXED times? My complaint against BOINC is that the BOINC Manager does not allow sufficient flexability, and as to estimated times going backwards, well....

Update 15:00

I've reset the hours and will leave the machine running all night, but I can't afford to do this all the time, here is an update of the task progress :



It is clear that the manager is getting tasks far too big for the machine, if I had not taken the exceptional course of action the first four jobs could not possibly be finished in time.

I want to promote BOINC as I do on the homepage of my site, I want it to be a fun and worthwhile thing to take part in, but something is sadly lacking in the set-up on 'boinc manager'

Please if you can see anywhere that I'm doing this wrong I beg you to put me straight.

Regards
Malcolm

.. and as to estimated times going backwards, well....

Estimated times are exactly that: estimated. Tasks in BOINC are constantly recalculated to see if they manage to be run before deadline or not.

As long as you let work go over the deadline and do not change the conditions under which BOINC should do work in any way (adding time, aborting work etc.), BOINC will learn whether they make deadline or not, and in doing so learn to ask more or less work for this project the next time. In your case that will be (a lot) less. Even if that means that some CPUs have no work, so be it.

Now then, your problem is with the PPS (Sieve) v1.39 (cpuPPSsieve) tasks. These have a 4 day deadline and they run slow on a CPU. These are tasks made for GPUs, so either you get one (Nvidia or AMD) or you just don't run these tasks on your CPU.
All of the other work it's able to do in time. So your only option around this problem is not to do PPS (Sieve) work. Under the conditions you allow BOINC to run at, it just won't be able to finish any of the given work in time.

If you find that troubling, it is not BOINC its fault. BOINC is following your conditions to the letter. But it can't dictate what a project should do with its applications and task length. So your complaint should be with the project, tell them that you run work on an i7 first generation CPU and that you allow BOINC to run only for 37.5 hours per 5 days and you want to run PPS (Sieve), and that to make their deadline, it needs to be increased to 10 days or so.

I see that the run time for CPU is 27 hours (from Michael Goetz in your thread), that's an estimated run time as well. It may be the run time on a third generation i7, but it won't be that on a first generation i7. And even then, variations in hardware and conditions.

Your BOINC is allowed to do work all together for 37.5 hours per 5 days (15.30-8.00 = 7.5 hours, 7.5 * 5 = 37.5 hours), or 135,000 seconds. Those are the numbers you'll have to work with to see if your computer is capable of running work at any project.

Apropos, I see you say you run 6.10.58, BOINC is at 7.0.65 for recommended, we're soon to go to 7.2.xx. These aren't just version changes which had the paint on the outside changed, there's a lot of changes under the hood as well, including whole new --from zero started-- CPU and GPU scheduler code. If you want to run with an AMD GPU, you'll need 6.12 in the minimum. Your i7 does not have a built in Intel GPU that's capable of running OpenCL work, so not going there. But you may want to consider upgrading.

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Hello

Many thanks for your time and trouble, I'm beginning to feel a lot happier about the whole subject of BOINC.

Well I tried upgrading and it didn't work, renamed the current files, downloaded the latest version : 7.0.65 then recreated the three files boinc, boinccmd & boincmgr tried a restart and a big fat nothing, so I overwrote the three new files with the old versions and I'm back to square one.

My GPU is a Radeon HD5700 series and I can't afford to change it, and a new CPU is way out of my pension range, but I would like to upgrade, why doesn't 'apt-get install boinc*' not do the upgrade?

I've got five Sophie Germain WUs and four old PPS three of which will finish today, in time, the remaining PPS will also beat the Wednesday deadline, so I'm getting there, several Sophie Germain WUs have already been returned and the score is mounting. I'm running 'Sophie Germain' & 'PPSE' only, would you recommend any others? I've 'Proth Prime Search (Sieve) CUDA, AMD (ATI)' ticked and I can't untick them, they just come back. I've a feeling that my GPU should pick this up but doesn't for some reason.

Best wishes
Malcolm

My GPU is a Radeon HD5700 series and I can't afford to change it, and a new CPU is way out of my pension range, but I would like to upgrade, why doesn't 'apt-get install boinc*' not do the upgrade?

You'll have to ask the package maintainers of your Linux that. They're responsible for keeping everything downloadable updated, so that includes BOINC.

Now, I don't mind looking around in rpms, but then I need to know which Linux you run. Mind telling me?

I've a feeling that my GPU should pick this up but doesn't for some reason.

If by GPU you mean your Radeon HD5700, you'll need drivers from AMD, plus allow for the GPU to be detected. See Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/Derivatives - GPU recognition fixes for how to do so in some distros. Or see No usable GPUs found. AMD Radeon HD6750 for how mike8347569357 fixed it under Fedora 17.

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Good Morning

Thanks for your quick reply, I'll go carefully through it and the links after breakfast.

I'm running Linux Debian 'squeeze' 2.6.32-5-686-bigmem (I've 32Gigs of RAM)

To be continued...... ;)

Yes, well, I've looked in all sorts of dark corners that I never knew existed before and I can't find anything that fits with the desired files or directories.

I did do an 'apt-get install boinc*' and it has made another installation of 6.10.58 somewhere.

Everything came back OK after a reboot, and everything looks like finishing before the 'Report Deadline' so apart from trying to upgrade to a later version of BOINC I thik I ought to stop before I break something.

M

I'm upgrading to 'wheezy' I'll get back to you after I see what I have in the way of BOINC

M

Back up and running Debian 'wheezy', picked up BOINC jobs where it left off but still only 6.10.58 I'll have a word with my mate in Malta and see if he can upgrade BOINC for me. He's a Debian Geek.

M

Now, hold on, it's not necessary to update, as long as things work great at this time. Although, if you want the GPU to work and need OpenCL support you'll need a minimum of BOINC 6.12. Most projects with GPU support, only have OpenCL applications for AMD Radeon HD GPUs.

If you truly want to upgrade to 7.0.65, go to http://pkgs.org/download/boinc. This site has 7.0.65 for Debian Wheezy and the how-to to install it.

Do know that BOINC 7 uses new CPU and GPU schedulers, that use a different method of recording how long tasks have taken. This means that this BOINC will have to relearn how long tasks take.

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Hi

I'm on Debian 'wheezy' and BOINC 7.0.65, we'll see how that goes for a few days,everything is on schedule except one last cpuPPSseive.

I've changed the sources file so as to get the latest version of BOINC with apt-get.

Wish me luck, and thank you for all your help, I'd never have got here without your help. I'll worry about the GPU when we see how things have settled down.

Best wishes
Malcolm

A word of warning about Boinc 7, with the new schedulers in it, cache operation now works differently, Boinc 7 uses the cache settings as a Minimum and a Maximum Buffer,
it'll fill to a Minimum plus Maximum level, then wait for the amount of work to drop to below the Minimum level before asking for work again,
for a consistent cache set the first cache setting to the amount of days work you want to cache, and the second cache setting to a very low value, something like 0.1,
If you use the cache settings you probably had from Boinc 6 you'll find the amount of work cached will vary a lot.

Claggy

Hi

I've set 'Minimum work buffer' to '1.00 day' and 'Max additional work buffer' to '0.10 days', brought in a huge number of jobs which was a bit frightening, but they're all do-able.

I appreciate your help to my experience with BOINC, if not for you and "Ageless" I think I'd have scrubbed the software from my machine.

Best wishes
Malcolm

Hi

All three machines are now settled into a good rhythm and all seems great thanks to your help, just one little niggle left is the 'VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Juniper [Radeon HD 5700 Series]' that Boinc can't find, I (well my expert in Malta really) has installed every driver he can find and it still doesn't get picked up. Any quick and easy tips for not wasting these resources please?

Upgrading the machine and BOINC were both well worth the effort, the new operating system 'wheezy' is easier to follow and faster.

Have a great day, I fully intend to
Malcolm