LHC@home

Hi,

I've recently joined lhc@home and gotten my first ATLAS tasks; one of those tasks has now been running for a little over 2 hours. I have also started a Theory task and the BOINC Manager "Remaining (estimated)" time changed from close to 3 hours before it started to now just under 4 days, after already running for well over 8 hours.

Can anyone give me an idea of what the average time to complete an ATLAS task would be? BOINC Manager is saying something over 4 hours with 4 CPUs - is that reliable? I'd rather not have all CPUs dedicated to one task, so is it possible to accurately estimate the time to complete for 1, 2 and 3 CPUs as well?

My machine is latest Windows 10, Intel Core i5-3470 with 16GB memory, 4 cores. I have the latest BOINC and Virtual Box combo installed (BOINC 7.16.5), which I upgraded to a week or so ago.

Thanks.

Doug

The ATLAS tasks are typically much shorter than theory, like 4-8hrs vs 12+

You can limit the tasks to use less than 4 CPU's but they will always take about the same time, since the virtual box is a wrapper for the real work they all do a number of smaller jobs inside the VM so the wrapper run time is somewhat arbitrary

As others already mentioned BOINC's runtime estimation is completely wrong for most Theory and ATLAS tasks.
At least ATLAS (vbox) has a built-in progress monitoring that can be seen if VirtualBox Extension Pack is installed.

1. install the VirtualBox Extension Pack corresponding to your VirtualBox version:
https://www.virtualbox.org/

2. BOINC may need a restart

3. ATLAS VMs that started after the extensions have been installed now provide an interface to watch the VM internal consoles.

4. Mark a task and click on the console button

5. In the console window press ALT-F2 to switch to console 2.


After a while the monitoring has collected enough data from the internal logs to estimate a remaining runtime.
Since the individual runtimes of each "event" can be from a few seconds to more than 1/2 hour the remaining time is a statistical value but it is more accurate than the value shown by your BOINC manager.