LHC@home

They could have announced it on the forum and leave the decision to abort to the crunchers. They could also have tested them on the dev-site first. But it is what it is, there's no point in crying over spilled milk.

I wasn't aware Boinc had the facility to remotely abort a started task. Perhaps it's just other projects don't like doing so. I'm not sure why anyone would want to finish a task which is just going to be discarded at the project end.

... Ivan isn't the only one running CMS ...

however, it looks like, doesn't it ?

Same error as described here:
https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/forum_thread.php?id=5982&postid=47976
Same solution, except that here (so far only!) the ATLAS vdi is affected.

4/25/2023 8:15:20 PM | LHC@home | Sending scheduler request: To fetch work.
4/25/2023 8:15:20 PM | LHC@home | Requesting new tasks for CPU
4/25/2023 8:15:21 PM | LHC@home | Scheduler request completed: got 0 new tasks
4/25/2023 8:15:21 PM | LHC@home | No tasks sent
4/25/2023 8:15:21 PM | LHC@home | No tasks are available for ATLAS Simulation

2023-04-24 10:34:15 (19704): Adding virtual disk drive to VM. (ATLAS_vbox_3.01_image.vdi)
2023-04-24 10:34:22 (19704): Error in deregister parent vdi for VM: -2135228404
Command:
VBoxManage -q closemedium "C:\ProgramData\BOINC/projects/lhcathome.cern.ch_lhcathome/ATLAS_vbox_3.01_image.vdi"
Output:
VBoxManage.exe: error: Cannot close medium 'C:\ProgramData\BOINC\projects\lhcathome.cern.ch_lhcathome\ATLAS_vbox_3.01_image.vdi' because it has 1 child media
VBoxManage.exe: error: Details: code VBOX_E_OBJECT_IN_USE (0x80bb000c), component MediumWrap, interface IMedium, callee IUnknown
VBoxManage.exe: error: Context: "Close()" at line 1875 of file VBoxManageDisk.cpp

2023-04-24 10:34:22 (19704): Could not create VM
2023-04-24 10:34:22 (19704): ERROR: VM failed to start
2023-04-24 10:34:22 (19704): Powering off VM.
2023-04-24 10:34:22 (19704): Deregistering VM. (boinc_59cce48668c5a14b, slot#0)
2023-04-24 10:34:23 (19704): Removing network bandwidth throttle group from VM.
2023-04-24 10:34:23 (19704): Removing VM from VirtualBox.

I can confirm we are now mostly running the Run 3 tasks. I asked for some test tasks here and got more than I thought :)

These tasks are processing 500 events but each event is faster than before so the overall run time should be only a little bit longer.

Also as you have noticed the console monitoring doesn’t work due to changes in the logging format. The “top” monitoring on Alt-F3 also shows a single python process instead of multiple athena.py processes.

Is the VM RAM size going to be adjusted eventually or will the current defaults be used because 3.01 can run 'Run 2' and 'Run 3'? Will the VM change the RAM assigned by 'Run 2' vs 'Run 3'?

The RAM size is set to 4000 MB independend of running tasks from run 2 or run 3.
It also doesn't matter whether you run single core vbox tasks or multi-core e.g. 4 or 8 cores.

The tasks that we crunch here are not results produced by LHC but simulations. So we are not depending on LHC running or not.

Be that as it may, I rather suspect what we crunch here is based on experimental reality. Otherwise, what is the point to any of it?

2022-11-27 16:22:00 (22224): Guest Log: No HITS file was produced
2022-11-27 16:22:00 (22224): Guest Log: Successfully finished the ATLAS job!
2022-11-27 16:22:00 (22224): Guest Log: Copying the results back to the shared directory!

No, -dev was fine. It was the translation to the main project that threw up a problem.

At the moment we are still in a development phase, but getting closer to real production running.

We have added some information on the processed events in ATLAS tasks on consoles inside the VM.

To show the consoles, go to the advanced view of BOINC manager, select a running ATLAS task and you should see the button "Show VM Console" on the left menu. If you do not see this button you may need to install the VirtualBox extension pack and/or install remote desktop software such as CoRD on Mac OS or xfreerdp on Linux. There should be remote desktop software included by default on Windows but maybe someone else can confirm this.

When you click "Show VM Console" you should see a terminal window with a login prompt. If you press Alt-F2 (Alt-Fn-F2 on Mac) you should see a screen like this:



NOTE you will only see this information after the task has been running for some time, i.e. has simulated at least 1 event. So please wait up to 30 minutes for information to appear.

This output shows the number of events processed by each core, as well as the time per event and the average time per event so far. Each core has its own independent counter which is why you see the event numbers repeated. In the example there are 4 cores and with 100 events per task each core will process 25 events each. This information therefore can give you an estimate of how long the task will run.

We are working on putting the "top" output into console 3 (Alt-F3) but it doesn't quite work perfectly yet.