LHC@home

Since yesterday, I have had several cases where a WU failed after about 4 minutes.
Excerpt from the stderr:

2021-07-20 01:39:12 (7380): Guest Log: Failed to produce a result! Shutting down the machine.
2021-07-20 01:39:19 (7380): Guest Log: 00:00:10.025871 timesync vgsvcTimeSyncWorker: Radical guest time change: -7 189 176 023 000ns (GuestNow=1 626 737 958 918 963 000 ns GuestLast=1 626 745 148 094 986 000 ns fSetTimeLastLoop=true )
2021-07-20 01:42:32 (7380): Guest Log: 00:03:22.995487 control Guest control service stopped

the complete report can be seen here: https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/result.php?resultid=322554079

Is this a misconfigured WU, or is there something wrong with my system?

This line is in all results, also the valid ones. At least one time after starting the VM, because the vdi is much older than the actual time.

The time sync errors have nothing to do with the task failures - they also appear when a tasks succeed:
https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/result.php?resultid=322554716

Nonetheless you may check the time and time sync settings on your host.


The failed tasks also fail on wingcomputers, Windows (vbox64) as well as Linux (native):
https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/workunit.php?wuid=168126490

Looks like a batch with a faulty input file.
The native logfiles print a more detailed hint:
https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/result.php?resultid=322548651

[2021-07-19 16:01:51] gzip: stdin: unexpected end of file
[2021-07-19 16:01:51] tar: Child returned status 1
[2021-07-19 16:01:51] tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
[2021-07-19 16:01:51] Failed to extract job description from input tarball
16:11:52 (3899757): run_atlas exited; CPU time 0.462507
16:11:52 (3899757): app exit status: 0x1
16:11:52 (3899757): called boinc_finish(195)

thanks, computezrmle, for your detailed analysis :-)

I had two more of these failures within the past two hours.
Same happened with the wingcomputers.