LHC@home

This is primarily for the admins of this project but feel free to chime in if you have something to add :)

So I'm sure you guys aren't just sitting around over there eating swiss cheese all day long however it seems like you have no plans to perform some database maintenance that needs to be carried out on this project. There are 2 issues I would really like to see fixed at some point as they are creating problems for the external stats sites and annoying users.

1) Clear out the old orphaned work units. I (and many other users) have several hosts that no longer exist or are not able to run BOINC for me anymore. I would really like to delete them so that my cross-project host stats are cleaner and more accurate. They have been deleted from all of the other projects they once participated in however I can't delete them here on LHC because they still have work units from 2005 associated with them. There was a bug in the BOINC backend that caused this problem. I believe it has been corrected and there are ways to clean up the mess. If you need help, I know the staff of seti@home have battled with this problem several times and I'm sure they would be glad to point you in the right direction on what to do with these orphaned work units.

2) There are still a couple hundred host records that are mangled from the upgrade that went bad and corrupted all the data in the host table. This is creating all kinds of trouble for some of the features I would like to implement on my stats site. It has been so long now that I think it is safe to assume that these hosts are no longer participating in the project. As such they could be safely deleted and thereby eliminated from the XML stats export.

Obviously these problems aren't the end of the world but if you have a few spare moments I think the users around here would appreciate these things being looked at. I know I would :)

I have mentioned this at least once before in another thread but I'm not sure if any of the admins saw it or not. If the answer is "no, we don't think it is worth our time" then so be it - I will let it go. Just wanted to make sure someone knew what issues it is creating for us users.

Toby

---

- A member of The Knights Who Say NI!
My BOINC stats site

This is primarily for the admins of this project but feel free to chime in if you have something to add :)

It's unclear whether we have an admin on this project at present. Chrulle has left for pastures new, and no new name has appeared. Ben Segal has overall responsibility for the project, but he's not involved on a day to day basis. Other names I have seen associated with the technical background either haven't been seen for a long time, or have no involvement beyond the application development role, or both.

the staff of seti@home have battled with this problem several times

Here's the real issue behind some of the maintenance you ask for: it's not easy. Previous requests of this type have been turned down because the solution could introduce more problems than it fixes. It would be nice to think that the downtime could be used to tidy things up, but the reality is that there's no resource available to do it.

---

Gaspode the UnDressed
http://www.littlevale.co.uk

It's unclear whether we have an admin on this project at present.

When i left, there was talk about a new spanish ph.d coming to replace me. But i have not heard anything more than that.

Other names I have seen associated with the technical background either haven't been seen for a long time, or have no involvement beyond the application development role, or both

All the people that have worked as sys admins through time has gone back to their studies. Jakob, Karl, Kalle and Markku all left to finish their studies, as did I. I returned and worked as a sysadmin for a year, but I am back in Denmark now enjoying the unseasonably warm weather and writing job applications.

The sys admin job has now been transferred to Ignacio Reguero and Phil Defert. Phil is working on automating the installation of a boinc server(so it is as simple as an rpm package), this makes it a lot easier to integrate the two new servers we got in the cern computer centres. Ignacio is mainly working on porting the new applications to lhc@home. Furthermore lhc@home is only a small part of their jobs. I have promised that I will be available if they have any technical question or need a few hours help with something I can guide them through remotely.

So you should not expect any major work being undertaken for the moment. Dave Anderson has also just released a request that people update the server software as soon as possible. I did an update just before I left so some of the features are already there. So I would guess they are mainly working on this.

2) There are still a couple hundred host records that are mangled from the upgrade that went bad and corrupted all the data in the host table. This is creating all kinds of trouble for some of the features I would like to implement on my stats site.

Couldn't you make a list of those hosts' id numbers and then use that list to discard those records from your stats program? You could also post that list here that would make the job of removing/fixing the records a lot easier for any coming admin.

cheers,
Chrulle

---

Chrulle
Research Assistant & Ex-LHC@home developer
Niels Bohr Institute

I haven't really been paying attention to the "behind the scenes" news of this project - just crunching work units whenever they are available :) So I wasn't aware of all of the changings/leavings that have taken place. I can understand this issue not being at the top of the To-Do list.

Couldn't you make a list of those hosts' id numbers and then use that list to discard those records from your stats program?

Technically yes but all my stuff is programmed in a project-agnostic way so I would have to add in some special cases specifically for LHC. There have been problems like this before but so far I have managed to get projects to clean up their data - since that is usually more desirable for both me and the projects.

You could also post that list here that would make the job of removing/fixing the records a lot easier for any coming admin.

Sure. I'm just going off of the host CPID. It looks like the corruption caused some number from another field to be stored in the CPID field. Normally the CPID is either null or a 32 character string so any records where it isn't one of those two is a pretty good indication that things are bad. Of course I don't have access to all the data so I may not be seeing all of them but I get a list of 197 hosts with those criteria. As a double-check I included the OS name in the list. In corrupt hosts it is also some number from another field. Here is the query and its results in my database. Warning! SQL ahead! :)

edit: I see the formatting is kind of ugly. At least <pre> works a little better than <code>

mysql> select id, os_name, host_cpid 
from lhc_hosts where host_cpid is not null 
and length(host_cpid) > 0 
and length(host_cpid) < 32 
order by id;
+-------+------------------+------------+
| id    | os_name          | host_cpid  |
+-------+------------------+------------+
|   548 | 4323203497.21169 | 1          |
|  3734 | 977385294.095796 | 1          |
|  8971 | 0                | 0          |
|  9677 | 1983243362.2538  | 1          |
| 14537 | 1561268999.72147 | 1          |
| 22501 | 2600236416.96948 | 11         |
| 23004 | 0                | 0          |
| 23006 | 0                | 0          |
| 23865 | 3726697966.29887 | 0          |
| 24898 | 2049053722.11362 | 2          |
| 26495 | 3152835385.64328 | 0          |
| 26525 | 4534006265.63645 | 150727     |
| 28290 | 3939925429.47743 | 1          |
| 28896 | 1                | 14421      |
| 29301 | 0                | 0          |
| 30120 | 2424569495.06303 | 1          |
| 31447 | 1145744152.96676 | 0          |
| 32919 | 4697424811.79383 | 0          |
| 33680 | 0                | 536330240  |
| 34303 | 0                | 0          |
| 34351 | 0                | 0          |
| 34666 | 0                | 0          |
| 37112 | 2621600241.63275 | 0          |
| 37513 | 2271822513.8661  | 1          |
| 38015 | 0                | 2147483647 |
| 38273 | 5942798540.3082  | 0          |
| 38725 | 0                | 0          |
| 39614 | 893110268.234828 | 1          |
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+-------+------------------+------------+
197 rows in set (0.23 sec)

---

- A member of The Knights Who Say NI!
My BOINC stats site