LHC@home

Due to the tight deadline of the ATLAS tasks, we change to deadline of ATLAS jobs from 2 weeks to 1 week. The ATLAS job takes about 3-4 CPU hours to finish on a moderate CPU (2.5GFLOPS).

essentially this seems to be okay, but:

All my clients, that got a task with 1-Week-Deadline are switching in panic-mode and start crunching the 1-Week-Deadline with "High-Priority". This indicates that something is wrong with this tasks. And as their are no other projects running on my clients, it can only be a problem with Atlas-Tasks themselve

Are the estimated flops set to a realistic number ?

The "High-Priority" and the complaints about varyiing credits ( https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/forum_thread.php?id=4271 ) indicate that they are wrong

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Supporting BOINC, a great concept !

got the first two Atlas with this week-deadline.
In the LHCatHome Website is the deadline ONE day later as in the Boincmanager shown.

All my clients, that got a task with 1-Week-Deadline are switching in panic-mode and start crunching the 1-Week-Deadline with "High-Priority". This indicates that something is wrong with this tasks. And as their are no other projects running on my clients, it can only be a problem with Atlas-Tasks themselve

Maybe you've BOINC work buffer set to =>7 days?

I've started a one week task on my HP Linux laptop, with VirtualBox RAM equal to 4200 MB but it soon went into Waiting for memory. I changed the RAM to 5200 of a total of 8000, but it still goes Waiting for memory. There is only another task running on the HP, a climateprediction.net with a very extended deadline (one year). The CPU is an AMD E-450 with 1.6 GHz, two cores.
Tullio

Hi Tullio, the setting in the appconfig are not passed to BOINC for it's calculations of memory consumption.

You can adjust the memory reported to BOINC by using the Max # CPUs setting (in web prefernces), where 3 cores is reported as 4.88GB to boinc.

Since you use the app config to force the number of cores the websetting have no effect on the number of cores used.

Thanks Toby. No, I simply start the VirtualBox Manager and make my modifications in the Setting. But it seems to go on, even if rather jumpily, and I am letting it run.
Tullio

There was discussion at some point of having a BOINC option to run longer work units that were being issued to the other computer centers. I guess there were some issues uncovered and it was never pursued further, but it worked well for me. It seemed like an efficient way to run.

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Regards,
Bob P.

tullio wrote:

I simply start the VirtualBox Manager and make my modifications in the Setting.

What do you modify directly with VirtualBox Manager?
To be honest I either completely misunderstand your method or I suspect this is part of the problems you described here:
https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/forum_thread.php?id=4324&postid=31817
tullio wrote:

all LHC tasks except SixTrack fail on all 3 for unknown reasons.

This is why you see waiting for RAM in Boinc, it doesn't know about the changes you made.

If you want it to run 2 tasks the Boinc need to know about the system utilitisation

I run all stock applications and never modify their settings. ATLAS@home starts at 4200 MB and then goes in Waiting for memory. That is why I tried upgrading the memory to 5200 MB and now it is at 80% after 16 hours. LHC@home tasks fail on my WINDOWS 10 PC which has 24 GB RAM. I accept only SixTrack tasks on my 2 Linux boxes whose RAM tops at 8 GB. Now I am trying Atlas@home on the HP Laptop and it seems to run with RAM at 5200 MB.
Tullio

@Tullio

Here you wrote that you modified the settings:
tullio wrote:

I simply start the VirtualBox Manager and make my modifications in the Setting.

Here you wrote that you did not modify the settings:
tullio wrote:

I run all stock applications and never modify their settings.

That's confusing and makes it hard to help you.

Nonetheless, if you try to run ATLAS you may set the preferences on the project's website to "number of cores = 1" and rise the RAM settings via an app_config.xml that looks like:

<app_config>
<app>
<name>ATLAS</name>
<max_concurrent>1</max_concurrent>
</app>
<app_version>
<app_name>ATLAS</app_name>
<plan_class>vbox64_mt_mcore_atlas</plan_class>
<avg_ncpus>1.0</avg_ncpus>
<cmdline>--memory_size_mb 5000</cmdline>
</app_version>
</app_config>

Then cancel the currently running ATLAS WU, restart your computer and download a fresh WU to ensure the settings apply.

I think that all BOINC tasks should work out of the box, without the need to write an app_config.xml file. In fact, I never wrote one in Linux or Windows, only once in SETI@home I copied one and then went back to stock applications. I am running SETI@home and Einstein@home both on CPUs and GPUs, plus climateprediction.net. I was running Test4Theory@home since November 2010 and it never failed. Since the LHC@home consolidation, all LHC@home tasks fail on my 3 PCs, except SixTrack.
I am only doing a test run with Atlas@home on the laptop HP PC with SuSE Linux Leap 42.2, VirtualBox 5.1.26 and BOINC 7.4.22.
Tullio

I agree that it should work without app_config.xml and I think it does. If it doesn't then we can get the admins to adjust the configuration.

can you make a new thread so this stay on topic?

these two have only 2 days deadline:
https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/workunit.php?wuid=74431041
https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/workunit.php?wuid=74435643

these two have only 2 days deadline:
https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/workunit.php?wuid=74431041
https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/workunit.php?wuid=74435643

I suppose the original mentioned deadline change was meant for the ATLAS VM-tasks and not for the ATLAS native tasks, it seems.

I think admins have said that the VM and native tasks come from the same pool and therefore have the same deadlines.

edit: And in the first post it says one week. Guess they have really urgent tasks, then. :)