LHC@home

Hello,

I have two workunits which my machine finished in time (regarding the deadline) and without any error.
But i didn't get any credits for my work, just because those workunits were handed out a second time (to machines running the native_mt app) and those machines finished the workunits faster than my computer.

This is very frustrating, because my computer only has a very tiny cpu and wu's take quite some time.
In this particular case i wasted about 100 hours of cpu-time, or about 0,3€ in electricity (1 kW).

I'm okay with wu's being canceled by server because another computer was faster as long as the wu's are in the queue and not currently being crunched, but i'm not okay with wasting resources.
Why are wu's handed out a second time in the first place as long as they doesn't error out?

Workunits: 83133808 and 83264910

I think i will stop crunching Atlas and head over to CMS and LHCb!

Regards, djoser.

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Hi, Djoser

Thanks for reporting the problem.. Yes we replicate the workunit if the first instance of the workunit does not return in 3 days, but we do give all finished instances credit if they pass the validation and return within the deadline(7 days)..
I check the both workunits you gave, actually they failed at validating due to our storage problems.. Unfortunately, since the end of December, the ATLAS BOINC storage area is saturated, so a big fraction of workunits fail at uploading or being validated due to this(the vaildation fails because the uploaded result file become inaccessible to the validator).. We are working on migrating to a different storage solution, this shall take some time..

Hello,

I have two workunits which my machine finished in time (regarding the deadline) and without any error.
But i didn't get any credits for my work, just because those workunits were handed out a second time (to machines running the native_mt app) and those machines finished the workunits faster than my computer.

This is very frustrating, because my computer only has a very tiny cpu and wu's take quite some time.
In this particular case i wasted about 100 hours of cpu-time, or about 0,3€ in electricity (1 kW).

I'm okay with wu's being canceled by server because another computer was faster as long as the wu's are in the queue and not currently being crunched, but i'm not okay with wasting resources.
Why are wu's handed out a second time in the first place as long as they doesn't error out?

Workunits: 83133808 and 83264910

I think i will stop crunching Atlas and head over to CMS and LHCb!

Regards, djoser.

Thanks for reporting the problem.. Yes we replicate the workunit if the first instance of the workunit does not return in 3 days, but we do give all finished instances credit if they pass the validation and return within the deadline(7 days)..

From the view of BOINC-Users, this is a waste of resources! A lot of user will dislike this handling.

You should set the Deadline to 3 days, then it is clear for all users what you want

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Supporting BOINC, a great concept !

I agree with Yeti.

Just to add one point:
As long as the download/upload problems are not solved, a shorter deadline would increase the volunteer's frustration due to more tasks "violating" the deadline.