Posts by Dronak

1) Message boards : Number crunching : Fairer distribuiton of work(Flame Fest 2007) (Message 15321) Posted 2 Nov 2006 by Dronak Post: I think LHC@home must find a way to spread the wu's a little fairer or there might come a time when they won't get their work done. It's not much fun to see that there are wu's and you don't get any for months. Maybe the crunccher who grab all they can should become a little less egoistic. Agreed. I'm here mainly to help with the science, but I also want to get a fair share of the work. It's been a little better recently than for the past few months, but I only got 2 work units today and 30000+ are still in progress. That hardly seems very fair to me. I'd really like to see the project implement a fairer system of distributing work units, but I doubt that they're willing to do anything about this, at least now. Perhaps an upcoming upgrade will take care of things. I'd really look forward to that.
2) Message boards : Number crunching : Work is available (Message 15320) Posted 2 Nov 2006 by Dronak Post: i found WORK IS AVAILABLE . . . But I bet they'll be gone fast. No doubt. I see over 30000 work units currently in progress. I got a grand total of 2 work units from that batch. :p Still, it is good to see some more work coming in here.
3) Message boards : Number crunching : Sweet heavenly goodness.... (Message 15319) Posted 2 Nov 2006 by Dronak Post: Yeah, the work units I'm getting are taking a few hours to run, which seems like a very reasonable length. Too bad I can't get very many work units at a time, but it does seem like work units have been produced a bit more regularly lately, which is good.
4) Message boards : Number crunching : Did everyone get work 02 Nov UTC? (Message 15318) Posted 2 Nov 2006 by Dronak Post: I didn't completely miss out, no. But I only got 2 work units. With over 30000 still in progress right now, I would have hoped for more, but I suppose people with huge caches are hoarding the work (again, as usual).
5) Message boards : Number crunching : When can we expect the next batch of wu's? (Message 14499) Posted 7 Aug 2006 by Dronak Post: Just leave your computer attached to LHC. Your computer will grab them when they're available. If you're lucky. I always have LHC connected, and I think I completely missed out on the last two batches of work. Each failed request for work seems to create a greater delay between it and the next request. Eventually it partially gives up and won't make another request for like 5-7 days. If you're in this state when work is released, I think you're going to miss out. As for the original question, I don't think anyone knows when more work is available. If you stay connected all the time, hopefully you'll get some. You could also check in very regularly, but apparently entire work batches can be gobbled up within 1 hour or so, so you'd have to be pretty luck on when you check, too. Letting the program handle it is probably the easiest way, even if it still requires some luck to get work.
6) Message boards : Number crunching : Why can't I get any work? (Message 14330) Posted 14 Jul 2006 by Dronak Post: Of all my machines I got four as well. They all finished in under 5 seconds and will sit in my que as pending forever. Or at least until they get an adminstrator. My list of results gets larger yet again. Seems there is some sort of bug where results claiming zero never get validated or purged. Sounds basically like my situation. I got a handful of units from the last batch, but they all finished practically instantly. A bunch of the ones I did get this time claimed 0 credit, and they're sitting there as pending, just like yours. I also have the impression that they are stuck and need some manual intervention to clear them. Given how few work units I'm getting lately, I wish the ones I did get would actually take some time to crunch. Lately, it has seemed pretty pointless to work on the project.
7) Message boards : Number crunching : I think we should restrict work units (Message 14247) Posted 7 Jul 2006 by Dronak Post: Wow, there's something like 13400+ work units in progress and I got three that took a grand total of 68 seconds to process. Amazing. And it'll probably be another 2-4 weeks before I see any more LHC work. What's worse is that I run three other projects and I'm about 3 hours from running completely dry. SETI's currently down for maintenance, Einstein isn't sending me work for some reason (maybe debt related), and SZTAKI is in the middle of testing new work units of which I can't get any (apparently they're designed for some fairly uncommon platform). I never thought that I'd completely run out of work with 4 projects. Too bad LHC's batch is all gone. That could have held me over for a little while, at least until SETI came back up.
8) Message boards : Number crunching : I think we should restrict work units (Message 14009) Posted 16 Jun 2006 by Dronak Post: wouldent it make sense to you that it would take that same 20 units the same time it took you to do 1 unit if they were done by 20 people instead? Yes. But at the risk of being blunt, some people are apparently more interested in personal gain (credits) than helping the project get work done as soon as possible. Unfortunately, we don't seem to be able to change the minds of the large cache people, so I wish someone from the project administration side would step in and straighten them out.
9) Message boards : Number crunching : I think we should restrict work units (Message 13969) Posted 13 Jun 2006 by Dronak Post: 69,624 total LHC@home users... isnt the work unit total like half that anyways? The "Work to be done!" thread has a few numbers. I think this most recent batch was around 67000 units, but the one before this was about 85000 units. So I guess it's kind of variable.
10) Message boards : Number crunching : I think we should restrict work units (Message 13963) Posted 12 Jun 2006 by Dronak Post: I don't think anyone considers raising the cache size to be unfair, however it is counterproductive for this project. Raising the resource share is productive for this project. A large cache is fair in the sense that it's not against the rules, but as you said, it's counterproductive, and at least some people think it's unfair, probably because of this. It's kind of like saying an action is not illegal, but it is immoral. You can still do it because you're not breaking any rules/laws, but not everyone is going to like it or agree with it. They can't do much about it though either. As I understand the BOINC system, you're right about how the settings work, so I agree. A large resource share tells your computer to spend a lot of time on LHC. A large cache tells you computer to grab a lot of work for LHC. The idea of the first is to complete work for LHC faster by not splitting your time among multiple projects when LHC has work to do. Getting more work units as well is a result of the setting, but not the primary intention. So this is productive. The idea of the second is to grab a lot of work so you have it for a long period of time. There are some good reasons for doing this, but getting lots of units so you get lots of credit is not one of them. You slow down the project in this case by sitting on work that other people could have been doing. So this is counterproductive for the project. I suppose there could also be something going on behind the scenes that we're not aware of, but would this site still list work units as in progress, not returned, if they weren't actually out in the hands of BOINC users? I suspect not, but I don't know for sure, that's why I'm asking.
11) Message boards : Number crunching : How can one look at the uncompleted Work Units (Message 13962) Posted 12 Jun 2006 by Dronak Post: I'm interestested in the work units that are shown on the homepage as still in progress. Not, the ones on my account. Yes, I realize that. And every work unit listed as in progress on the home page is in somebody's quorum group where credit has not yet been granted. So if you're one of the people who still have credit pending because of the work units still in progress now, you can easily find out information about the computers working on those units by going through your account information as I mentioned above. If you're like me and have no pending credit right now, then I don't know how you can find the in progress work units. Is this clearer? I was talking about work units listed as in progress on the home page.
12) Message boards : Number crunching : How can one look at the uncompleted Work Units (Message 13955) Posted 12 Jun 2006 by Dronak Post: Is there a web page that will allow one to look at the work units that are not yet complete? If you have credit pending because of work units that are still in progress, it's pretty easy. Basically you go through your account information to see the work units you have that haven't been granted credit, look at the information about the quorum group for that work unit, then look at the computer information for whoever still has that work unit in progress. I've done this on other projects to get some idea of when I might expect credit to be granted for work units I finished about 2 weeks ago. If you're not in a group with work units still in progress, it's probably harder. If you can find the work unit numbers of units still in progress, you can look them up, but I'm not sure how you'd find that information easily. I don't know of any built-in system function that allows viewing of all currently unfinished work units.
13) Message boards : Number crunching : I think we should restrict work units (Message 13918) Posted 10 Jun 2006 by Dronak Post: how do you know that the "hoarders" didn't have a "proper" reason such as a slow modem or dial up line? or an older machine, or one that doesn't crunch 24/7? That's possible, sure, and I don't think people would complain much if people have a legitimate reason for using a large cache. One way to check this would be to find some work units that are still pending, then look at the computer's details. Some of the information there must give you an idea what the computer is like in terms of age, speed, percent of the time BOINC runs, network connectivity, etc. That should help you decide if the person is keeping a large cache for a legitimate reason or not. The on and off work status of LHC is new to me, so it's tough for me to understand exactly what's going on, why, and how to solve the problems. I do know that it's disappointing to see so many work units in progress, waiting to be done, while my computer has been sitting dry for over 1 week. I think many others share this feeling, and that's one of the reasons for the complaints. We suspect that not everybody has a proper reason for maintaining a huge cache of work, and the people who don't have a proper reason are just being greedy, taking work from others for themselves and preventing work from being done promptly.
14) Message boards : Number crunching : I think we should restrict work units (Message 13873) Posted 4 Jun 2006 by Dronak Post: I notice that this is slowed down by a minority of users who set their caches to maximum. When the number of work units available hits zero, we still have to wait a week or more while the people who grab a maximum number of units empty their cache before the scientists can even begin the analyzing process. That doesn't help the project - that's greed by people who want the most LHC units. Thanks to your clear explanation, I raised my cach for .01 to 10 days. And yup, As soon as there was work to do, I was able to get a bunch of it to work on. I'm sure MattDavis or someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the original post, quoted in part here, was saying that you shouldn't max out your cache. Doing that means you get a lot of work, true. But it also means that the work gets done slower because you're sitting on work that other people with a lower cache (getting work as they complete it) could be doing. Leaving some computers dry is not the best way to get work done promptly. It slows down the process and makes everyone wait longer to get more work. Wasn't that the whole point behind the original post and subject of limiting work units? To make sure that everyone gets a fair share, not to have some people hogging work for themselves while others' computers get left dry?
15) Message boards : Number crunching : How to tune Boinc for LHC? (Message 13836) Posted 2 Jun 2006 by Dronak Post: Thanks for the information. I was wondering about this, too. I'll try to make some modifications to my settings before the next round of work becomes available and see if it helps.
16) Message boards : Number crunching : Work to be done! (Message 13835) Posted 2 Jun 2006 by Dronak Post: Server Status Up, out of work 67,144 workunits in progress 43 concurrent connections Well lets see how fast we can get this block of data processed! At the moment, I see "53856 workunits in progress" and apparently they're all sent out to other people, because I have no work in progress right now. It looks like I need to make some more adjustments to my settings in order to get some more work next time. I did get more this time than before, but still, a lot of work has yet to be done and my computer's dry.
17) Message boards : Number crunching : I think we should restrict work units (Message 13746) Posted 26 May 2006 by Dronak Post: BOINC handles that situation pretty well, actually. When a project runs out of work, the scheduler effectively ignores it (it sets the "short term debt" to zero). When work becomes available, it starts paying attention again. Thanks for the information. The Wiki does have a lot of information, but sometimes it can be a bit hard to understand if you're not too familiar with how things work. That's why I thought I'd ask here. I increased LHC's resource share, got BoincView to see the debt values, and you're right. It's asking for work from LHC, which is at zero short term debt, and the other projects I'm on seem to be cycling between each other as normal. So everything should be fine, and hopefully I'll be a bit more prepared for LHC's next batch of work. (I could increase the resource share even more than I did, but I'll test that out over time to see what I want it to be.)
18) Message boards : Number crunching : why so much of difference ??? (Message 13743) Posted 25 May 2006 by Dronak Post: why such an amount of difference for the crunching http://lhcathome.cern.ch/results.php?hostid=165488 Joseph yours. The host you indicate seems to be behaving pretty normally. What's the problem? because the time variation of crunching from 34 second to 13220 second all my result are: succed done credits The FAQ at http://lhcathome.cern.ch/FAQ.html#2.2 says that they give out work units of three different lengths (10,000, 100,000, and 1,000,000 turns around the accelerator). Your units seem to complete in three time ranges (hundreds of seconds, thousands of seconds, and tens of thousands of seconds). Maybe you've gotten work units of all three lengths and that's the difference?
19) Message boards : Number crunching : I think we should restrict work units (Message 13742) Posted 25 May 2006 by Dronak Post: Having a high resource share will cause you to mostly do LHC work when it is available. This is a bit of an aside to the original topic, but I hope people don't mind. I used to run only one project, so I'm trying to learn how to manage multiple projects effectively. If I give LHC a large resource share, it will get more CPU time. But will doing that cause LHC to eat up computer time even when there's no work available? I don't want projects with work to sit idle while LHC attempts to get non-existent work. Does resource share have an effect if you have no work to do? If not, increasing it now to prepare for next time should be fine and not change anything until LHC work units come in. I just want to check and make sure I understand how things work. Thanks for the help.
20) Message boards : Number crunching : I think we should restrict work units (Message 13725) Posted 24 May 2006 by Dronak Post: I notice that this is slowed down by a minority of users who set their caches to maximum. When the number of work units available hits zero, we still have to wait a week or more while the people who grab a maximum number of units empty their cache before the scientists can even begin the analyzing process. That doesn't help the project - that's greed by people who want the most LHC units. I'm just getting back into these sorts of projects after a break when my (old) computer really couldn't handle it. I'm new to this project, and I must say that I was definitely surprised to find people with lots of work units queued up in progress (I think some had 100-200!) while I was only able to get 3 units. And I actually changed my network connection time near the finish of my first unit to make sure I could get another one or two more before they ran out. I was afraid I wouldn't get any more if I waited, and apparently rightfully so. It is disappointing to have an empty queue and be ready to do work, but not be able to get it because other people are sitting on it. People like me who could do work and help get it done faster aren't able to. I don't know the exact problem/cause or what a good solution is. Maybe deadlines are part of it. Maybe the WU/day limit is part of it (there is one, right?). Maybe etiquette is part of it. Perhaps users can help solve the problem, maybe the people behind the project can do something to help even things out. shrug I'll keep an eye on the boards to see what's going on. I hope something can be done. I want to do work for this project when it's here, but feel a bit cheated seeing others sit on a lot of work while my computer goes unused. It feels like I'm being prevented from doing my fair share of the work. A kind of side, related question: what happens to units that miss the deadline if there is no quorum?

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