LHC@home

Current size of active hosts and out of work problems?

I was thinking it would be nice to know what percentage of the 6000 hosts we started with are still active and running WU’s at any one time and what the current WU/host is.

Because of the fair amount of time since the last runs I’m sure some have dropped LHC@home, I know I almost did. My problem with it was I had no control over the tine interval when BOINC would dial up to see if it had work. It was tying up the phone line all that time and I found I had to disconnect from the LHC WU’s just to get some peace.

If the message comes in “out of work” what is a good reason other then “gee we didn’t think of that” no one programmed BOINC to then hold for so many hours instead of trying to dial out ever 60 seconds for hours until the time interval got to say an hour or two before it drops down to 60 seconds again.

If LHC or any other hub has no work what is the reason that they can not send out a message to the BOINC program and the host to not look for work until such and such a date. To me it is just bad planning and I’m sure if LHC or anyone else finds the need to reach out and get more hosts to crunch WU’s, this lack of foresight in the BOINC program would be the largest part of it. Just because the programmers have DSL or can be online 24/7, is not a good enough reason to trust that the rest of the world has what they do.

If I didn’t happen by chance to look at the LHC home page and se the message that it was up and had WU’s again I could of gone easily a week more in peace because my system wasn’t trying to get work 100 times a day or more. Come on the WU’s are fine they kick right in and out no problem; the problem is lack of foresight by the BOINC programmers. I have told them this on the little list they have; that I no longer read because they do not hear past the rumble they make.

Send out some e-mails I’m sure you’ll find many got as tired of it as I did. If they are still willing to talk with you at all.

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You have a point there. But there isn't much we can do about the BOINC core client behaviour. Furthermore, it's very hard to predict when new work is available next... It's up to so many persons with very busy schedules.

There is an option "Connect to network about every NNN days" in the user preferences ( http://lhcathome.cern.ch/prefs.php?subset=global ). Setting a higher value should prevent a dial-up connection from being made too often. But I haven't tested this.

Current active user base is about 2000 users and 4000 hosts. So it's true we have lost about two thirds of registered users, but this was predictable. And even the current user base is draining the work out off the server quite fast.

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Markku Degerholm
LHC@home admin