LHC@home

I'm new to LHC. I did a quick scan of the forums and don't see this problem:

Most of the Theory Simulation tasks I've run become "infinite" runs after about 40 minutes of crunching. That is, the estimated time remaining jumps from minutes to 9 or 10 days. I assume something failed/corrupted and I just abort the tasks.

Is there a fix?

Thanks!

Win

You may check the stderr.txt in the slots folder.
If it looks a bit like this you should let the task run:
https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/result.php?resultid=399093799

Your logs show that you cancelled many tasks.
This may have confused BOINC's runtime estimation.
Beside that Theory tasks can have real runtimes between a few seconds and 10 days.
Extreme runtimes are rare but they happen and this always confuses BOINC which expects runtimes to be as close to the average as possible.

I'm new to LHC. I did a quick scan of the forums and don't see this problem:

Most of the Theory Simulation tasks I've run become "infinite" runs after about 40 minutes of crunching. That is, the estimated time remaining jumps from minutes to 9 or 10 days. I assume something failed/corrupted and I just abort the tasks.

Is there a fix?

Thanks!

Win

This is normal behavior for Theory tasks, at least when running in VM. There is no actual feedback of task progress to Boinc manager, it is just using an internal estimate of task progress. And if task is not finished by original estimate the time remaining display on Boinc jumps to show maximum runtime (which is 10 days). This estimation has nothing to do with task's actual needed runtime. Only place where you can see the progress of the task is inside the virtual machine terminal window Alt+F2.

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Thanks.

Thanks!

I also am seeing time remaining jump to around 10 days, and it never drops I let one run for two days, and time remaining never dropped

At the same time VBOXHEADLESS is using ZERO CPU according to Resource Monitor

clicking your link gives

No such task: 399093799

The DB deletes successful results about 2 weeks after assimilation.


Near the end of stderr.txt you should find a line like this:

2023-09-21 02:44:46 (21624): Guest Log: 02:44:46 PDT -07:00 2023-09-21: cranky: [INFO] Container 'runc' finished with status code 0.

If the status code is "0" the scientific app succeeded.


At the end of stderr.txt you should find a line like this:

02:44:53 (21624): called boinc_finish(0)

Here, status code "(0)" means the task succeeded from BOINC's perspective and you should be given credits.

2023-09-21 02:26:45 (21624): Setting Memory Size for VM. (2000MB)

This points out you are using a higher RAM setting for your VMs via app_config.xml.
That's not wrong although Theory tasks don't need it.
They run fine with the standard setting of 630 MB.