LHC@home

<blockquote>This is again a problem with longterm and short term view of things.

GasGiant you want your machines not to run out of work, which is understandable, but if we give long deadlines we will have a very long tail of jobs that do not finish. This will then lead to a very long time for a study to finish, and therefore a much longer time between runs where you will have work outages from us.

I think we all noticed that the last work outage was on the order of days and not weeks or months as we have seen before.

I agree that maybe the current deadline is a bit short, but it is what the statistics say will give us the best turnaround time(well it is actually two standard deviations more to not give a too low deadline), if too many people drop out and stop crunching the statistics will automatically detect this and raise the deadline again. I might incorporate a minimum deadline of say 6-7 days. I do not think that a 5 day deadline is way too low but it is about the smallest reasonable amount.



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Why can't you have multiple runs going at once, with staggered starts?

I'm sure the physicists and engineers can come up with more than one scenario to test at the same time...

Then nobody would be in the position of running out of work while they decide what to test next.

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<blockquote>This is again a problem with longterm and short term view of things.

GasGiant you want your machines not to run out of work, which is understandable, but if we give long deadlines we will have a very long tail of jobs that do not finish. This will then lead to a very long time for a study to finish, and therefore a much longer time between runs where you will have work outages from us.

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Chrulle,

I really only want enough work to last from 5pm Friday to 8:30am Monday. With the current LHC deadlines, wu estimations and BOINC operation this cannot occur. Is it so unreasonable to try and keep 2.75 days of actual work on my machine if you can be guaranteed it will be returned within 4 to 5 days? If your basically happy with this then you need to start to lobby the BOINC devs to change the max cached work before EDF mode is hit to be increased from 50% of the earliest deadline to something higher like 80%. This is where there is a basic fault with BOINC which then causes major swings in project allocation, wu caching and user frustration. This whole discussion might have been avoided IF this constraint was at 80% and not at 50%.

Live long and crunch.

Paul.

If they cannot analyse the results until all of the wu's are crunched, AND you have hoarders and slowpokes delaying the end of the run, then dropping the deadline seems perfectly reasonable. Remember, they have a job of work to do and we are helping them with it. It is not they that are helping us.

As I understand the newer BOINC cores, if a project loads a wu which needs to be crunched at higher than normal priority to meet a deadline, then the project as a whole gets a debt hit so it will not download any more wu's until that debt hit has been cleared. Thus the other projects get xactly the quota YOU asked for. How, therefore is LHC being "greedy".

Just to add, the new deadline doesn't affect me at all. I download 1 wu at a time, crunch it and upload it again, typically 2 wu's per day with a quota of 20%

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Wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream.

Not every project is going to be perfect for everyone. The project developers are the only people who can determine what project settings meet their needs. If you can't run a project due to short deadlines, I'm sure that's a risk they've factored in to their reasoning. A shorter deadline definitely rules out some machines, but if the machines are more a hindrance to the expected progress than a help, then I would expect them to do what they've done. To call them greedy or say they're trying to take over your machines is just stupid...

Hi Heffed. Very much agree with your statements here except
<blockquote>To call them greedy or say they're trying to take over your machines is just stupid...</blockquote>
I don’t think it’s stupid, just too harsh to call them greedy etc.
I guess it’s 1 of the BOINC hazards to consider wu’s as entities.
To download a wu and then immediately have to process it because of deadline does make that wu appear rude. I can understand anyone being upset at seeing this behavior.
Most of us understand the unique needs of this project and trust the folks involved to make the right decisions.
I hope 5 day deadlines aren’t absolutely necessary but I am not in this for my own comfort and will try to contribute within the constraints.
I still think all projects should be encouraged to strive for 14 day slack :-)

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The deadlines seem to be getting longer again. Just got one for the 12/09/05 today.

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Same here I have just received on deadline the 12th

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With pref set to 4 day connect I noticed that hosts updated here in past 24hrs each downloaded 1 wu due in 4 days and 1 due in 9 days.
An interesting attempt at compromise?