LHC@home

Are large, vLHC-style CMS jobs still a thing? I.e.:

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I spot-checked a few recent completed WUs and didn't see any like that.

I don't think we're doing that at the moment. Ben would know, but he's in Paris until Monday. :-)

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I can confirm that we are not doing large jobs at the moment. We have everything is place but are going to focus on the project consolidation, stability and reliability before we attempt anything more ambitious.

My CMS jobs are all having problems and the symptoms are indicative of being too big for my computers. That is, all were suspended (waiting on memory) until BOINC finished all the tasks from other projects. Those jobs running on Computer 10342612 all finished and validated once the cache was cleared but BOINC could only run one CMS at a time and the computer was clearly slower responding when the CMS tasks were running. And the task which was assigned to Computer 9926211 finally failed with STATUS_STACK_BUFFER_OVERRUN after BOINC had cleared all other tasks from its cache and CMS started running.

I hope this is not indicative of how normal-size CMS jobs are supposed to perform. If so, I will have to opt out of running CMS application tasks.

CMS requests at least 2.33 GB of free RAM (singlecore; 2 GB for the VM).
Only 2 of your hosts have enough physical RAM to fulfill this requirement:
https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/show_host_detail.php?hostid=10342612 (3981.84 MB; should be enough)
https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/show_host_detail.php?hostid=9926211 (2662.86 MB; only slightly above; may be very sluggish due to heavy disk usage)

The Theory tasks are in good supply an only need 600MB of ram.

My CMS jobs are all having problems and the symptoms are indicative of being too big for my computers. That is, all were suspended (waiting on memory) until BOINC finished all the tasks from other projects. Those jobs running on Computer 10342612 all finished and validated once the cache was cleared but BOINC could only run one CMS at a time and the computer was clearly slower responding when the CMS tasks were running. And the task which was assigned to Computer 9926211 finally failed with STATUS_STACK_BUFFER_OVERRUN after BOINC had cleared all other tasks from its cache and CMS started running.

I hope this is not indicative of how normal-size CMS jobs are supposed to perform. If so, I will have to opt out of running CMS application tasks.

We'll be sorry to see you go, but thank you for trying. We can't guarantee that our design decisions will be suitable for everyone, unfortunately, but your experience is valuable feedback.

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Thanks to all who replied. Obviously, I haven't fully absorbed the magnitude of all the changes that are coming via the LHC@home consolidation. It's a huge difference from when it was "only Sixtrack" and I have to admit that, until now, I haven't been paying close attention. I promise to do better. And, even though CMS may not be suitable for the computers I currently own, it might be the justification I need to upgrade. ;-)

for your single core systems, the upgrade to 4Gb of ram shouldn't be too hard. The Pentium system can take up to 16Gbthis costs about $60