Xcuse me, but I noticed sometimes that a task which is scheduled to last for - let's say - 4 hours has been running for something as 50 hours (I leave one of my computers always on and maybe I don't look at it for some days especially when I'm away) and is still at 40% or so. I usually stop that ones. But wasting much time. I partecipate also to other projects (Seti e WCG) and it never happens with their task. Can somebody help me? Foxtrot

A task should not run longer than the runtime you setup in your preferences + 4 hours. You could try resetting your computer. If the task continues to show no progress (percentage does not increase), abort the task.

I concur with transient, with the qualification that we are talking about actual CPU time here, not the elapsed time shown in the recent editions of BOINC Manager. If the machine is busy running something with a higher priority, the BOINC tasks may be out there for hours and not get any CPU time. That means the watchdog doesn't have any CPU time to see what's going on as well. It also probably means there is another application burning CPU cycles on your machine.

---

Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

What does Communication Deferred mean?

What does Communication Deferred mean?

When your machine would like to reach the project, it waits until you're configured preference (if any) for when to use the network allows BOINC's use, then it tries to contact the project. If this contact fails for any reason (network problems, no work from project, project servers down) BOINC sets a delay before trying again. This avoids having it try constantly sucking up bandwidth for you and the project, trying repeatedly to hit a server which may be down. Each time contact fails, the delays get progressively longer. This helps the project servers recover, by not having everyone hit them at the same time.

---

Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

I'm pretty new to Rosetta (but have been on SETI@home for >10 years).

Everything has been working just fine, but it's been many days since I last received work. I'm about to run out of work units, with two in process now and only one more to replace them when completed. I do want to keep my CPUs busy. The Home Page makes it look like there are plenty of jobs available.

Any ideas? Below is today's messages so far:

11/19/2010 6:21:40 AM rosetta@home Restarting task Ross2X3_SAVE_ALL_OUT_r435_005_22542_1381_0 using minirosetta version 217
11/19/2010 6:21:43 AM rosetta@home Restarting task thioredoxin_LESSPCSCST_BOINC_abrelax.default.v1_SAVE_ALL_OUT_22535_3544_0 using minirosetta version 217
11/19/2010 6:21:44 AM rosetta@home Sending scheduler request: To fetch work.
11/19/2010 6:21:44 AM rosetta@home Requesting new tasks for GPU
11/19/2010 6:21:46 AM rosetta@home Scheduler request completed: got 0 new tasks
11/19/2010 12:58:34 PM rosetta@home Sending scheduler request: To fetch work.
11/19/2010 12:58:34 PM rosetta@home Requesting new tasks for CPU
11/19/2010 12:58:35 PM rosetta@home Scheduler request completed: got 1 new tasks
11/19/2010 12:58:37 PM rosetta@home Started download of 1ZGG_pcs_cst_files.r2.v1.zip
11/19/2010 12:58:43 PM rosetta@home Finished download of 1ZGG_pcs_cst_files.r2.v1.zip
11/19/2010 1:42:37 PM rosetta@home Sending scheduler request: To fetch work.
11/19/2010 1:42:37 PM rosetta@home Requesting new tasks for GPU
11/19/2010 1:42:39 PM rosetta@home Scheduler request completed: got 0 new tasks


Thanks,
Rick

---

=================================================
There is never a wrong time to do the right thing

R@h does not have GPU tasks. The only time shown in your messages that CPU work was requested, you received some. How are your network settings configured? How often is BOINC to connect and how many additional days of work are you asking it to keep on-board?

---

Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

R@h does not have GPU tasks. The only time shown in your messages that CPU work was requested, you received some. How are your network settings configured? How often is BOINC to connect and how many additional days of work are you asking it to keep on-board?

The GPU messages are something quirky about my BOINC installation. They appear even though I've got "Use GPU..." turned-off. This has not been a problem for either SETI@h or R@h. SETI@h can use nVidia GPUs; I have an ATI anyway.

My BOINC network configuration is completely unrestricted; it can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, etc....

I ask for 10 days of work, my norm from participating on SETI@home, which goes down often. (It's been down for ~3 weeks right now.)

My last two R@h work units are being crunched now. Since it takes ~30 hours to crunch one work unit, these are almost certainly the same WUs I was running yesterday. (This PC is off a night.) In 15.5 hours, I'll have no work.

Today's log:
11/20/2010 10:18:57 AM rosetta@home Sending scheduler request: To fetch work.
11/20/2010 10:18:57 AM rosetta@home Requesting new tasks for GPU
11/20/2010 10:18:58 AM rosetta@home Scheduler request completed: got 0 new tasks
11/20/2010 10:51:30 AM rosetta@home Computation for task Ross2X3_SAVE_ALL_OUT_r435_005_22542_1381_0 finished
11/20/2010 10:51:30 AM rosetta@home Starting 1ZGG_R2_LESSPCSCST2_BOINC_abrelax.default.v1_SAVE_ALL_OUT_22545_19922_0
11/20/2010 10:51:32 AM rosetta@home Starting task 1ZGG_R2_LESSPCSCST2_BOINC_abrelax.default.v1_SAVE_ALL_OUT_22545_19922_0 using minirosetta version 217
11/20/2010 10:51:33 AM rosetta@home Started upload of Ross2X3_SAVE_ALL_OUT_r435_005_22542_1381_0_0
11/20/2010 10:51:37 AM rosetta@home Finished upload of Ross2X3_SAVE_ALL_OUT_r435_005_22542_1381_0_0
11/20/2010 10:51:38 AM rosetta@home Sending scheduler request: To report completed tasks.
11/20/2010 10:51:38 AM rosetta@home Reporting 1 completed tasks, requesting new tasks for GPU
11/20/2010 10:51:39 AM rosetta@home Scheduler request completed: got 0 new tasks
11/20/2010 11:15:11 AM rosetta@home Computation for task thioredoxin_LESSPCSCST_BOINC_abrelax.default.v1_SAVE_ALL_OUT_22535_3544_0 finished
11/20/2010 11:15:13 AM rosetta@home Started upload of thioredoxin_LESSPCSCST_BOINC_abrelax.default.v1_SAVE_ALL_OUT_22535_3544_0_0
11/20/2010 11:15:17 AM rosetta@home Finished upload of thioredoxin_LESSPCSCST_BOINC_abrelax.default.v1_SAVE_ALL_OUT_22535_3544_0_0
11/20/2010 11:15:22 AM rosetta@home Sending scheduler request: To report completed tasks.
11/20/2010 11:15:22 AM rosetta@home Reporting 1 completed tasks, requesting new tasks for CPU and GPU
11/20/2010 11:15:24 AM rosetta@home Scheduler request completed: got 1 new tasks
11/20/2010 11:15:26 AM rosetta@home Started download of 1T17_pcs_cst_files.r2.pnoe.v1.zip
11/20/2010 11:15:33 AM rosetta@home Finished download of 1T17_pcs_cst_files.r2.pnoe.v1.zip
11/20/2010 11:15:33 AM rosetta@home Starting 1T17_R2_pNOE_LESSPCSCST2_BOINC_abrelax.default.v1_SAVE_ALL_OUT_22550_20557_0
11/20/2010 11:15:34 AM rosetta@home Starting task 1T17_R2_pNOE_LESSPCSCST2_BOINC_abrelax.default.v1_SAVE_ALL_OUT_22550_20557_0 using minirosetta version 217
11/20/2010 9:36:38 PM rosetta@home Sending scheduler request: To fetch work.
11/20/2010 9:36:38 PM rosetta@home Requesting new tasks for GPU
11/20/2010 9:36:39 PM rosetta@home Scheduler request completed: got 0 new tasks

---

=================================================
There is never a wrong time to do the right thing

Well, the discussion has been carried about many times before. All I can really say is that Rosetta is giving your CPU work when your machine is asking for it. The amount of work requested, and when it is requested is entirely up to the BOINC core client running on your machine, and the code that decides how and when to fetch work, and how to handle two projects when one is down is an area that is changing frequently. They are still really trying to achieve the right balances between enforcing your resource shares, always having enough work for all of the CPUs you've configured for BOINC to use, returning work on time (i.e. before deadlines), etc.

10 day buffer for a machine that has full-time access to the internet seems like an odd combination, but you certainly should expect BOINC to deliver something much closer to your preference then you seem to be getting. Keep in mind that the maximum runtime preference you can set for Rosetta is 24hrs, if your machine is estimating 30hr completion times initially, it would tend to indicate you've had a few tasks recently that ran long. Also, keep in mind that you've probably now accrued quite a "debt" of CPU time to SETI and so BOINC is really hoping SETI is going to give you some work to help deliver the resource shares you have specified.

Another factor could be that BOINC will not request work for a project that is currently running tasks at "high priority" to try and avoid passing the deadline. If at one time you did have a 10 day buffer, the oldest of those tasks would be close to it's 10 day deadline and perhaps be causing this to occur.

Another thing that could be a factor is BOINC learning how many hours per day your machine is typically running. Although it sounds like you have a fair history of being rather consistent about that. So BOINC has probably got a reasonable idea that "10 days" of work for the way you use your machine is... say 120 hours of work (12 hrs per day?). So if you have tasks that will actually take 15.5 hours to complete, you actually have (in my example anyway) 31 hours of work because your machine is off half the time. Adjust the specifics for your duty cycle, but you get the idea.

My advice?? Don't worry about it. I am confident that BOINC will ask for, (and very likely receive) more work before you completely run out. I say "very likely" just because no project has work available all of the time, but your odds of R@h having work are very very high. Depending on your BOINC version, I have see it actually run out of work for 5 or 10 minutes before it actually asks for more. As I say, the folks at Berkeley are working on it.

---

Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

Well, the discussion has been carried about many times before. All I can really say is that Rosetta is giving your CPU work when your machine is asking for it. The amount of work requested, and when it is requested is entirely up to the BOINC core client running on your machine, and the code that decides how and when to fetch work, and how to handle two projects when one is down is an area that is changing frequently. They are still really trying to achieve the right balances between enforcing your resource shares, always having enough work for all of the CPUs you've configured for BOINC to use, returning work on time (i.e. before deadlines), etc....

Thanks for your helpful explanation. It's good to know R@h is always there with more work; I'll stop fretting.

10 days of work is my habit because the SETI@home project is very unreliable and not always available. It goes down perhaps once each month, or currently, more than one month as they replace and rebuild a crashed server. S@h also shuts-down Tue-Thu every week. I guess that's the best they can do on a near-zero budget. I believe the majority of their money comes from donors like me.

I started R@h to fill-in these downtimes.

---

=================================================
There is never a wrong time to do the right thing

Is Rosetta@home using a sufficiently recent enough version of the server software to use the feature for setting the minimum time before requesting another GPU workunit different from the minimum time before requesting another CPU workunit, for sufficiently recent versions of BOINC at the user's end?

I've read that if it is, you can reduce the requests for GPU workunits by telling the user's end to wait nearly a week before requesting any more GPU workunits, if you're not planning to have any ready by then.

Hello,

Just installed BIONIC after being away for couple years. I am new to Rosetta. After setting up Rosetta I as shocked to see it running 2 services each using almost 400 mb each. I am running it in a Win28k x64 VM with 1536mb ram on a Hyper-V server. Rosetta is using almost 800mb which is half the ram in the VM. Is this normal?

I would like to install this on over systems but I am definitely not going to if its going to use this kind of resource and not play nice with the system.

Thanks,

Todd

It is normal for one task to run per virtual CPU on the machine. You can configure the percentage of the available CPUs you would prefer in the BOINC preferences. You can also configure a preference for the percentage of each CPU's time you would like BOINC to run.

It is not abnormal for a task to use over 300MB of memory to run, especially on a machine with the memory to do so. If the machine had less memory, Rosetta avoids sending it tasks that are known to require more memory then average. You can configure the percentage of memory you would prefer in the BOINC preferences.

You have not defined "playing nice". But BOINC has added a lot of controls for you to inform it as to your own unique definition and then it will run within those parameters.

---

Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

Thanks, I was a little worried at first but I understand now. When I used BIONIC with SETI years ago it didn't utilize a lot of ram. I was not expecting the current memory utilization. When I reduced the ram available in bionic the processing stopped. I increased it some and 1 of the 2 processes is now running, the other shows waiting for memory - it picks up once the system is idle. Guess I just expected this to run in 30 - 50 meg of ram like the old bionic.

Not playing nice to me would mean something that takes more than a small percentage of system ram(5% -15%) on a pc that was expected to perform other tasks and this was low priory function.

Please understand I am not knocking the process. I was concerned because I want to install this on various pcs and was worried it would bring some of the older systems to their knees to the point of system crashes. However I installed Rosetta on an older dell with 2ghz and 512mb of ram today and it seems to do just fine.

Right, when you limit the memory that BOINC is allowed to use, the only throttle is has to enforce that limit is preventing a task from running. If the machine is doing other tasks as well, it might be good to use the CPU settings to limit BOINC to 1 CPU. That way another CPU is always available for other work (although BOINC tasks run at the lowest possible priority), and there would never be a second task worth of memory to page out before something else can run.

Rosetta@home uses a substantial amount of RAM. But some other BOINC projects run on less. So, perhaps your older machines will be happier running other applications that consume less memory.

---

Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

Guess I just expected this to run in 30 - 50 meg of ram like the old bionic.

The memory requirement varies between projects. Due to the nature of the research Rosetta is involved with it is one of the more memory-hungry projects using the BOINC system. Other projects often use much less memory per task.

If you find some of your systems just can't cope with the memory load you may want to try some less intensive projects. I recently put together a brief list of similar medical research projects on BOINC if you do want to try other options.

Edit:
Looks like Mod.Sense is a little quicker than me at typing.

Hi all; I am a newbie here, and have a few questions concerning the software schedules. First of all, I am using one of our under-utilized servers in an industrial environment. It is an HP Proliant DL-580, 8 Xeon CPU machine running at 3.0ghz, and with 8GB of RAM. During buisness hours, I am running it at 70% CPU time, and evenings and weekends it is running at 99%. It is in a very cold environment, so heating issues aren't a problem with running it that hard, in fact, none of the CPU's ever get over 115 degrees F.

I have the time schedules working correctly, but I always have to change the CPU time manually. Is there a way to automate CPU time changes along with the time schedules?

Also, when the machine is running at 70%, all of the CPU's run at 100% for a time, then drop to 30% for a few seconds, then back up to 100%. I guess that's how the software averages the CPU time, but it sure looks jerky, and I'm not sure that it is good for the CPU's. Is there a way to throttle the CPU's more evenly so that they are at a constant 70% ? TIA

Thank you for the reply. Yes, it is a windows machine, and I have tried various core limitations with the same jerky results. I will check out TThrottle. I didn't realize there were command line options with the Boinc manager. I will check them out too. I just love the challenge of a good batch file LOL!

Regards, Rock.

The jerky CPU line is just a fact of life. CPUs don't run "at 70%", they are either running (100%)... or not (0%). BOINC cycles the tasks on and off to achieve the target usage. In your case you are probably below 100% to ensure available CPU for other work, but many are using this as a heat control mechanism and it works great for that.

As for ensuring available CPU during business hours, BOINC runs at a low priority. It TRIES to run 70% of CPU, it has tasks demanding CPU 70% of the time... but if the machine has something else to do, it will run that and the BOINC tasks will not get the full 70%. The main factor there being to have enough memory to avoid page faults when the primary workload hits.

You can read more about boinccmd in the BOINC wiki here. You might create two configuration files (cc_config.xml) so you have one for day and one for night with the corresponding CPU %. Then have your batch file copy in the one that's appropriate, then run boinccmd and tell it to "--read_cc_config". It will just keep running, read the new preferences and alter the preferences. You will see the messages indicating new preference settings in the messages tab. So the messages should look just as they do when you set the preferences from the GUI.

---

Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

Thank you Mod-Sense! I will dig into the .xml files and see what I can do!

Regards, Rock

Thanks again Mod.Sense, I have it working perfectly now with 2 batch files, and Microsoft Scheduler. It runs 4 cpu's at 51% during buisness hours, and 8 cpu's at 91% the rest of the time.

Regards, Rock

I'm running a Macbook, and just joined Rosetta yesterday. It turns out that I had a bad battery in the computer, so when I unplugged it - instant shutdown. Now when I try to start the BOINC Manager, it refuses to start and gives an error:

BOINC ownership or permissions are not set properly, please reinstall BOINC.
(Error code -1202)

When I look at the file stderrgui in the BOINC Data directory, there's a line at the end saying

Permissions error -1202 at /Library/Application Support/BOINC Data/projects/boinc.bakerlab.org_rosetta/gfx_info

I know that OpenOffice, in similar situations, has refused to let me edit a file I was working on before a crash; when I delete a hidden lock file, it works again. Is there a similar fix that I can make here? If I delete the gfx_info file, will it get rebuilt? Is there anything I can do, short of reinstalling BOINC? If I do need to reinstall BOINC, will it overwrite or abort the tasks I already have downloaded?

Thank you!