SETI RAC dropping

[UBT - Timbo]

Hi all,

Some of you may have noticed our SETI RAC has been dropping.

There's always going to be more than one reason for this, but the one thing that can be said is that it *IS* affecting the entire SETI project - so it's not just our Team:

See here:

http://www.boincstats.com/stats/project ... php?pr=sah

(shows the reduced amount of total credit (per day - the third graph down)being granted to members of the SETI project)

and here:

http://teamseti.com/status/status.phtml

(shows the number of SETI WU's "in progress" has gone down by nearly 50% ! in the last few days)



As can be seen, since the switchover to Enhanced WU's only, many clients would by now have returned all (most?) of their cached v4.x work and are now working on the new v5.x WU's instead.

The net result:

1) v5.x usually take more processing and hence take more time to complete (and more chance of the work returned NOT being validated correctly, resulting in ZERO granted credit even though more time has been spent "crunching" it). So credits will take longer to be "granted" - but this is a minor blip until the "gap" can be made up.


2) Some hosts may be running the opti-application and crunchers have not updated their app_info.xml file to cope with the latest v5.15 aplication requirement - hence they can be busily downloading WU's but they are not being processed and are returning as "client errors".

3) Some hosts may now be retired from the project, as the time required to complete one WU is now far too great - I've seen a "To completion" time of 40+ hours for 1 WU, which beforehand took just 3 hours. I've certainly "retired" 2 PC's as they are not "man" enough to crunch a WU in a reasonable time - I did a couple of v5.x WU's and both errored and received ZERO credits after 10 hours of crunching each one (and this was using the "stock" application, not an opti..!)

(Edit: OK - now I've seen it all - I have a Celeron 667 MHz, which has been a great little cruncher for some time and I thought, to help the SETI RAC issue, I'll download a WU and see if it helps:

After 12 hours of crunching, it has completed 1.4% of the WU.....! So, by rights, that's a to completion time of 857 hours !! B*gger that - where's the abort button ! )


All of this leads to think that the SETI admins have made a bad decision concerning the cessation of supply of v4.x WU's.

regards,

Tim

[UBT - Halifax-lad]

Couldn't care less on any RAC drop, at the end of the day its a project I crunch for regardless of what goes on in the background, too many people are attached to what goes on with the projects, leave BOINC to it with multiple projects or just SETI and all will work out

Edit: If people don't like it then move on to another projects theres plenty to choose from.

Edit2: If that sounds a bit stong good  have just woke up

[UBT - Simon]

Edit2: If that sounds a bit stong good  have just woke up

I know what you mean Dave I feel like i just woke up as well...... don't think it helped being woken up at 2am mentioning no names.... Morning Jackie btw

[UBT - Mikee]

don't think it helped being woken up at 2am mentioning no names.... Morning Jackie btw

Am I missing something here? A bit of gossip we should know about?

[UBT - Simon]

don't think it helped being woken up at 2am mentioning no names.... Morning Jackie btw

Am I missing something here? A bit of gossip we should know about?

Nah just a 2am wake up call no gossip

[richard.vallance]

My VAIO has a 3.07GHz processor and after 24 hours the progress for a SZTAKI WU is still only 1.100% . I'm routinely seeing WUs take 18 hours or longer on all 6 of the BOINC projects I'm attached to  

[UBT - Timbo]

My VAIO has a 3.07GHz processor and after 24 hours the progress for a SZTAKI WU is still only 1.100% . I'm routinely seeing WUs take 18 hours or longer on all 6 of the BOINC projects I'm attached to  

Hi Richard,

It was to be expected that as CPU power increased, that WU's would somehow want to take advantage of this in order to do more work.

Secondly, as you might expect, most of the projects are non-profit making and hence they don't have a lot of hardware or connectivity available to withstand the onslaught of many thousands of "short-duration" WU's all being returned at once. So to get around this, they make the WU longer, so that each cruncher is only up/down loading WU's maybe once or twice a day.

Also, some of the WU's do not update the %age time spent on each WU. so it might show up as 1% but it could be 20% through the WU.!!

In the end, it shouldn't make any difference whether you are crunching 4 short WU's of 4 hours each or 1 WU of 16 hours.... as you'll get about the same amount of credit for the same amount of time spent crunching.

regards,

Tim