21) Message boards : Number crunching : Maximum elapsed time exceeded (Message 22025)
Posted 9 Mar 2010 by Profile Neasan
Post:
Any chance, that the results will finish in time?

This chance depends on new CPU time limit, Your machine needs approximately 2 days.

The new limit is over 2 days so you should be fine.
22) Message boards : Number crunching : Two announcements (Message 22024)
Posted 9 Mar 2010 by Profile Neasan
Post:
But i see the problem too often, that the people don´t see the chances in BOINC etc

Summing up i want to say, that when i read whot you write here, and think about it, then must say, that it is a shame that you have so littel support from CERN.

Agreed, I am not defending or condoning CERN\'s treatment of LHC@home but that is sadly how it is. There are people at CERN who do understand and support BOINC but money and hands are tied. We do the best we can with zero dedicated effort or funding. This isn\'t always good enough for some of the volunteers here on the board but sadly, as I said, this is how it is. I watch the boards (usually lurking) and I do bring the views expressed on here to meetings and we do our best to fix issues. However the priority is to get the work from the scientists, get it crunched and get it back to them. This has always got to work so other concerns fall by the way side sometimes.
some especial the older ones just work with fortrane and thats it. They are not open for new things. I think that´s a big mistake.

Although I started it Fortran is old but that doesn\'t make it bad. SixTrack is written in Fortran. So no complaints from me, it works.
23) Message boards : Cafe LHC : Why Does This Board Introduce Spurious Characters In Posts? (Message 22009)
Posted 8 Mar 2010 by Profile Neasan
Post:
Upgrade of the server code is on the to-do list and will be implemented soon.

That should kill a few things not just the spurious characters.
24) Message boards : Number crunching : Computation error (Message 22008)
Posted 8 Mar 2010 by Profile Neasan
Post:
OK we think we have a solution and it should go online once we have tested it.

Sadly it involves stripping out the graphics but this is a stop gap as the scientists want to get their work done and bigmac is on holidays as of today.

Once he is back graphics will become something for him to investigate.

I will keep you updated.
25) Message boards : Number crunching : Waiting on Linux App (Message 22007)
Posted 8 Mar 2010 by Profile Neasan
Post:
It is coming bigmac is working on it. Sorry for the delay, it could be a couple of weeks due to him going on holidays. However we are aware we need it ASAP.
26) Message boards : Number crunching : Maximum elapsed time exceeded (Message 22006)
Posted 8 Mar 2010 by Profile Neasan
Post:
A solution has been implemented. Sadly this probably won\'t help running WUs.

Actually the \"Maximum elapsed time\" was originally reduced due to comments by volunteers.
27) Message boards : Number crunching : Two announcements (Message 22005)
Posted 8 Mar 2010 by Profile Neasan
Post:
But you have lot´s of people, that can writw programms.

LHC@home has one retired physicist (bigmac) that is our entire coding team.
The experiments have a few coders (not loads) but they are busy coding for their experiments and Grid. This is also about to take a hit due to the change in funding of the Grid.

Also when you have a good algorit then you can take it normaly easy to another platform.

Porting an algorithm is not porting an entire suite of applications written by numerous people over the last 10 years for a particular architecture and operating system.
This servers always have a very fast network (myrinet or so) and they have often lot´s of ram. But this is a optimal setup to solve the problems.

For optimal setup read \\\"currently the only way\\\". Firstly every academic institute is connected to GEANT, this is leagues ahead of the internet connection home users will have. However for some this isn\\\'t even enough and they have paid commercial providers for even better connections.
I study physik, and so i think like in the history also today lot´s of cumputing power is need to solve the flith path of the particels. But just for such problems GPU´s should be VERY powerful.

Yes they should however no one has coded LHC applications for GPUs. The emergence of GPUs is extremely recent in a community where Fortran is still used and building of the machine started 17 years ago.
Ok let´s stop here. All in all i can´t understand why you ignore the community. Alone when i think how much money you can save when you haven´t to buy a lot of Servers or pay for current/cooling. When the CERN isn´t interested realy in our help, then just say it, but don´t say, that our hardware is to bad for the work!

OK you, and a lot of people on here, seem to have the wrong end of the stick with this project. LHC@home is not at QMUL because it looked like a fun thing to do (although it did) CERN were about to withdraw all support of the project. This despite not actually providing much beyond a space in a rack for a server. This is fact. LHC@home would most likely have completely died had we not taken the server to QMUL.

Computing for the LHC experiments is being done and most likely will always be done by the grid which has been built for that purpose. Since I started with LHC@home I have been looking for some more applications that are LHC related for the project. Not one of the experiment reps I have talked to thinks that their code could be ported. I am still looking and am still hopeful that we can do something. However for the moment all we have is SixTrack with the upgrade work starting we might find some more machine applications we can run but as I have explained processing of data from the experiments with LHC@home is very unlikely.
28) Message boards : Number crunching : Maximum elapsed time exceeded (Message 22003)
Posted 8 Mar 2010 by Profile Neasan
Post:
Just discussed this in a meeting.

The problem is that the job calculates how long it will run for. A new user is using slightly different calculations and it seems to be killing that calculation. bigmac is looking into it and should be able to extend the maximum time allowed quite easily.
29) Message boards : Number crunching : rss feeds are down (Message 21959)
Posted 5 Mar 2010 by Profile Neasan
Post:
Which one? This one?
http://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/rss_main.php

I can see it and W3C says it\'s valid
30) Message boards : Number crunching : Computation error (Message 21958)
Posted 5 Mar 2010 by Profile Neasan
Post:
Seen it, knew the graphics would bite us in the ass eventually. They were way too pretty.

We have been considering killing the graphics as they are a stumbling block when compiling. I'll pester bigmac and Alex.
31) Message boards : Number crunching : Two announcements (Message 21957)
Posted 5 Mar 2010 by Profile Neasan
Post:
What does this mean for volunteers who have been waiting a long time for new work? The announcement is not clear on this point.

I am unclear to your question as well.

The LHC@home project uses a programme called SixTrack. This models the beams within the LHC machine. The beam studies we are doing now are related to the upgrade of this machine in 2 years.

The project currently has no plan to run data coming from the 4(6) experiments that use the LHC machine. This is for twofold reasons:

1) The code is not portable, it is unwieldy and only runs on Scientific Linux CERN edition and some related platforms.

2) Each datasets is in the 100s of GigaBytes range transferring this and the results back and forth between us and you volunteers is just not feasible. Theoretically you guys could store an individual dataset however we would have to store them all which is 15PB of data each year.

There are investigations into getting further work but finding a suitable application, someone willing to port it (with ongoing support) and then finding someone to utilise it is proving difficult.

The team using SixTrack however have a big study coming up, this should run for a while and we hope to have a Linux version by then as well. They also think that they will be submitting studies more regularly now they are working on the upgrade.

I know we\'ve been quiet on here (except bigmac) but I have been scrabbling around trying to get us moving on new things and its not easy.
32) Message boards : Cafe LHC : Two announcements (Message 21927)
Posted 4 Mar 2010 by Profile Neasan
Post:
http://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/forum_thread.php?id=3164
33) Message boards : LHC@home Science : Two announcements (Message 21926)
Posted 4 Mar 2010 by Profile Neasan
Post:
http://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/forum_thread.php?id=3164
34) Message boards : Number crunching : Two announcements (Message 21925)
Posted 4 Mar 2010 by Profile Neasan
Post:
1) The LHC is back up and running you can follow its progress on the CERN twitter feed @CERN or the @lhcstatus feed. The latter is actually a scrape of the screens that the physicists watch to monitor the LHC machine.

2) LHC@home is also back. After a long quiet period we have new studies to work on. The executable has been updated (which is why there is not a Linux version available yet) and the project is now crunching simulations for the LHC upgrade. The team at CERN are working on the Linux executable and the team at QMUL are looking at the server code and are hoping to update that soon.

This is all I will say for the moment. However LHC@home is being used for beam studies from the LHC machine running actual data from the experiments is unlikely as the code has been written for the grid and the datasets are measured in 100s of gigabytes. We have been looking into other LHC uses for the project but it is not easy.
35) Message boards : Number crunching : Why BOINC 6.X has issues with LHC@home and other things (Message 20766)
Posted 14 Nov 2008 by Profile Neasan
Post:
the very least they can do and it would take much from their budget


The least they can do is nothing and I have explained this the budget is set, they asked for money to do certain things and they got the money to do certain things and LHC@home was not in that plan THEY ARE NOT ALLOWED DIVERT FUNDS THAT HAVE BEEN ALLOCATED.


And if they don\'t like that then let them buy the CPU time they pee down the drain. I have a hunch things would get fixed real quick if they had to do that.

The work just wouldn\'t get done in that case, there is no money for this, no money at all zilch, zero, nada, nothing if they had to buy the CPU this work would not get done, this is not the perfect scenario for the LHC but that is what they would have to do.

You seem to think we relish \"stealing CPU\" and working on a best effort basis with no money. I can assure you this project is very frustrating to work on without you telling me it is (by the way thanks for the reminder I was actually having a good day).

Do you think we have a massive pile of money we control and we are just sitting on it laughing maniacally? If we could make money and more effort appear we would have by now, all we can do is keep bidding for money from various bodies.

Yes this what this project does is important but when they look at the list of things to do be done the see more important things, like actually fixing the machine after the failure in September.

Your badgering doesn\'t \"shame the powers that be\" it just winds me up. We know you have misgivings about the IR minimum quorum and we have been talking to the scientists about it the new SixTrack they are working on should also to drop both of these numbers. In this case the squeaky wheel does not get the oil it merely makes the user consider walking
36) Message boards : Number crunching : Why BOINC 6.X has issues with LHC@home and other things (Message 20764)
Posted 13 Nov 2008 by Profile Neasan
Post:
LHC@home\\\'s parent project has a $6 trillion budget

LHC@home has no parent project we have nothing to do with LHC other than LHC scientists and engineers use our system to run their calculations, the resources and time are donated by all, Alex, me, the server here at QMUL, your computers your time this is all donated.

The LHC has a massive budget and all of it is spoken for that is how science works, you ask for X to do Y and you (might) get X to do Y not Y + Z.

You think your frustrated with the money thing, I do LHC@home in my spare time and have 3 other jobs so they can keep me funded.

I don\'t know how you think science funding works but you seem to have it wrong the LHC has cost so far £3.5bn (including the Grid infrastructure and people costs) in total and that has been spent it is gone. Also this cost has been spread between the contributing nations, that may sound like a lot of money but the National Health Service here in the UK alone costs £105.6bn each year that is 30 LHCs.

Science budgets are tiny and we have bid time and time again for money from this project but have been rejected, Dagorath we\'ve had this discussion before, you are volunteering your time if you are unhappy you are free to leave and stop contributing when you want.

In other news we are not blocking any particular clients that is not preventing you from getting work. You also have to wait a certain length of time between requests this prevents flooding the server with requests and taking down the service. There is also a quota on how much work you can get in a day so you may have reached that. Also there may not have actually been work the numbers on the front page are generated and are not real time up usually correct within a certain value.

Also the scientists are looking at the quorum and initial replication so there could be news on tha front too.
37) Message boards : Number crunching : Is it possible to inform us.. (Message 20763)
Posted 13 Nov 2008 by Profile Neasan
Post:
People submitting jobs are in Vancouver, New York and Geneva. We have asked for a heads up on a few occasions and they never have but jobs get gobbled up so quickly by the volunteers it isn\'t too much of an issue or is it because you don\'t get enough work from us? We have tried to limit how many jobs people get and how often they can ask to get a good spread.

When I have time I could try and convert the amount of WUs up and waiting in to an RSS feed?
38) Message boards : Number crunching : All my WUs resulted invalid (Message 20762)
Posted 13 Nov 2008 by Profile Neasan
Post:
Sorry we\'ve been busy, the wjuly_lhcboind set of WUs are only working something like 1 in 15 attempts. We have no idea why, they are mostly test units and the reason you\'re seeing so many is why are trying to debug. It is melting heads at the moment but all the real work was getting done and passed back to the scientists.

The 6.X issue is to do with the graphics so we need to recompile the executables and since we\'re doing that the scientists are doing some other work to the executable.
39) Message boards : Number crunching : Why BOINC 6.X has issues with LHC@home and other things (Message 20722)
Posted 30 Oct 2008 by Profile Neasan
Post:
It\'s because of the screensaver graphics so we are working on rolling out a new version of SiXTrack sans graphics ASAP and eventually finding a replacement package.

I swear this project is going to be more professional very soon, Alex and I are trying to implement a system around BOINC regarding job submission, application updates, server upgrades, knowledge base etc etc that was not in place and so needs to be almost reverse engineered into place, this means it is quiet on the outside but moving along in the background similar to the server upgrade (another coming soon) and the deletion of as many duplicate hosts as we could do safely.

We have been reading the boards whenever we get 5 minutes but I have been uber-snowed under with work nonsense so have not been replying (sorry) but I can say that Alex has been out at CERN this week so hopefully more great news to follow if not look out for a murder in the east end of London next week although that wouldn\'t be very rare.

Thanks for sticking with us folks especially Dagorath who I have only contemplated killing on one or two occasions ;-)
40) Message boards : Number crunching : needs 13 GB? (Message 19610)
Posted 13 May 2008 by Profile Neasan
Post:
We definitely don't ask you for 13GB of disk space :-/


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