I do note the very large number of people who have left and continue to leave the project and it does not surprise me in the least.
It has to be time to rethink some things and that includes the three day time limit.

Before Seti shut down there were 40-50k hosts returning tasks daily here. Currently it's around 550k daily. Good observation.

After the massive influx of new users and hosts, the project did have a massive rethink, doubling the minimum runtime and cutting the deadline from 8 days to 3.
It was massively successful, enabling 10x as many tasks to be returned with more useful information in a lot less time, while not exceeding the server capacity (which was being hammered at the time)

That being the case, if you could tweak your settings appropriately to your ability to run and meet the deadline the project requires, that would be great.
Or you could continue being late to return your tasks and get no credit for them. Your choice.

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Have you tried setting No new tasks about the time any more tasks downloaded will not finish in time?

Yes but it doesn't work out well enough. Reducing the cache helped better but i still have to cancel some. It doesn't help that i sometimes stop to crunch for Folding. :)

Folding@home? If so, I have Folding@home doing GPU work only, with BOINC projects taking up all of the CPU time they can without interfering with Folding@home or with my email reading. That allows both Folding@home and BOINC to crunch nearly 24 hours a day.

Have you tried setting No new tasks about the time any more tasks downloaded will not finish in time?

Yes but it doesn't work out well enough. Reducing the cache helped better but i still have to cancel some. It doesn't help that i sometimes stop to crunch for Folding. :)

I have no idea as I've never used it, but would it help to set something in Boinc's "Daily Schedules" tab under Computing Preferences? I wonder what it would do.

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I have no idea as I've never used it, but would it help to set something in Boinc's "Daily Schedules" tab under Computing Preferences? I wonder what it would do.

I don't know. It doesn't seem to forbid specific days. Just specific hours some days. In the meantime, i will try to reduce further the cache to see if it helps well enough. :)

I have no idea as I've never used it, but would it help to set something in Boinc's "Daily Schedules" tab under Computing Preferences? I wonder what it would do.

I don't know. It doesn't seem to forbid specific days. Just specific hours some days. In the meantime, i will try to reduce further the cache to see if it helps well enough. :)

That appears to mean that you can exclude certain days by excluding all of the hours on those days.

I'd expect how much it helps to depend on how well BOINC uses the excluded days in its calculations of how much work to download.

The BOINC manager is not that good at predicting my compute time and anyway i am not home on weekends so i always have some tasks due to finish a day my computer will be off. So at the end of the week i have to cancel a batch. Systematically.

I understand they want their results fast but i cannot always provide.

Just leave the machine on. Computers enjoy crunching :-) I've got 6 running 24/7. 5 of them in another room where I can't hear the fans!

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I've been seeing a lot of

error while downloading

tasks, and the website sometimes gives me the message "Project is Down."

Is this just me or are others seeing this too?

Is this just me or are others seeing this too?

Me too.
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/results.php?hostid=4684790

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I have no idea as I've never used it, but would it help to set something in Boinc's "Daily Schedules" tab under Computing Preferences? I wonder what it would do.

I don't know. It doesn't seem to forbid specific days. Just specific hours some days. In the meantime, i will try to reduce further the cache to see if it helps well enough. :)

In this era of high speed, always-on internet connections, what purpose does the cache even serve? I have mine set to zero so it just downloads WUs as others finish and it works just fine. And since those WUs are always "fresh," I never have to worry about running up against the deadline.

I have no idea as I've never used it, but would it help to set something in Boinc's "Daily Schedules" tab under Computing Preferences? I wonder what it would do.

I don't know. It doesn't seem to forbid specific days. Just specific hours some days. In the meantime, i will try to reduce further the cache to see if it helps well enough. :)

In this era of high speed, always-on internet connections, what purpose does the cache even serve? I have mine set to zero so it just downloads WUs as others finish and it works just fine. And since those WUs are always "fresh," I never have to worry about running up against the deadline.

I run Milkyway, where the tasks take one minute on a graphics card. I can't download them that often, the server doesn't allow it. I only set my cache to 3+3 hours though. For example, on my CPUs I currently have 66 CPU tasks running and 12 tasks queued. It doesn't seem right to me to be constantly downloading 1 task at a time, I'm sure the server prefers I download batches of say 6. In fact on my 24 core machines, they could be trying to get tasks from Rosetta extremely often if they got one at a time. What if one task finished at 3:00pm, so it downloaded a new task, then another core finished at 3:01pm? And another at 3:02pm? I suspect I'd hit a server limit of how often I can contact.

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I run Milkyway, where the tasks take one minute on a graphics card. I can't download them that often, the server doesn't allow it. I only set my cache to 3+3 hours though. For example, on my CPUs I currently have 66 CPU tasks running and 12 tasks queued. It doesn't seem right to me to be constantly downloading 1 task at a time, I'm sure the server prefers I download batches of say 6. In fact on my 24 core machines, they could be trying to get tasks from Rosetta extremely often if they got one at a time. What if one task finished at 3:00pm, so it downloaded a new task, then another core finished at 3:01pm? And another at 3:02pm? I suspect I'd hit a server limit of how often I can contact.

Ok, that sounds like a reasonable fringe case. But for the vast majority of people whose computers take hours to run each WU, it doesn't seem like a cache of jobs really adds much benefit from a project standpoint. It just unnecessarily delays WU completion as they sit claimed-but-idle in someone's queue.

Ok, that sounds like a reasonable fringe case. But for the vast majority of people whose computers take hours to run each WU, it doesn't seem like a cache of jobs really adds much benefit from a project standpoint. It just unnecessarily delays WU completion as they sit claimed-but-idle in someone's queue.

Agreed, for normal computers without Milkyway on GPU, or with huge numbers of cores. A long time ago I'd use a big cache on projects which had a lot of server downtime, but I don't think many do that much now. Even if they did, if you have two projects your computer can fall back on the other one.

But a queue of 3+3 hours (I think the Boinc default is pretty similar) isn't much, since it also includes the time for the running tasks to complete. Say you have 4 cores, and they have all recently started an 8 hour Rosetta task, they all have 7 hours to completion. No tasks will be queued, because Boinc can see all 4 cores are going to be busy for 7 hours. Only when it gets below 3 hours will it download anything. At this point with my setting, it would get one task per core, and if you have 24 cores like two of my machines do, zero queue would mean constantly hammering the server for work.

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i don't get new work, too, Some days ago the "NumberFields@home" had a problem: Expired SSL certificates. User action was required. Maybe here the same?

i don't get new work, too, Some days ago the "NumberFields@home" had a problem: Expired SSL certificates. User action was required. Maybe here the same?

That was a while ago. If you're on the latest Boinc version that's not why.

And you can see in Boinc's messages whether it just says "Got no new tasks" or "SSL error". At the moment they've just run out, which you can see on their server status page.

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IT_POWER_SALZKOTTEN,

I see that your computer is still using BOINC 7.16.5. Upgrading to BOINC 7.16.7 is known to fix that problem for SOME of the BOINC projects running under Windows, so could you try that?

https://boinc.berkeley.edu/download_all.php

Also, Rosetta@home now has so many users that it cannot generate work fast enough to keep all the computers busy all of the time.

You might want to add another BOINC project to fill in for such times. I prefer World Community Grid for that purpose, since they are currently doing COVID-19 work. Choose their Open Pandemics subproject for that purpose, but you might want to allow work from their other subprojects as well to help with other medical research.

https://join.worldcommunitygrid.org?recruiterId=480838

Not sure if you count it as a sensible reason, but around 6,000 people are dying in the world of CV19 every day for the last few months.

Which is reducing as we become immune.

UK isn't the only country in the world, Peter.
The wave is predominantly in the Americas now and isn't significantly reducing. Several states in the US and in Brazil are still increasing.

And immunity, if it even exists, which is completely unproven atm, would require 20x as many to be infected as have currently been.
And that's not even allowing for whatever immunity as exists, will even last long enough for others to get to the level of a herd.
In past SARS epidemics, immunity that initially existed was found to be only 15% as strong after 9 months.
That is, herd immunity will <never> happen outside of vaccination. So we continue.

If it's any consolation, I've been back at work since the beginning of last week now that the building owners have allowed us to return - it had been a public liability issue for them.
Of the other 7 business on my floor, only 1 other has returned. The other 6 were allowed to open throughout, but chose not to due to the lack of footfall, which is continuing tbh. Last week we reached just 22% of the same week last year.

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Anyone else not getting work units? 3900X running 16 hours a day at idle...


EDIT: Yes, should have read the thread.

Anyone else not getting work units? 3900X running 16 hours a day at idle...


EDIT: Yes, should have read the thread.

Err, do fill us in as I don't see the answer recently ;) [edit] Nm, apparently just been bled dry of WUs.
Although, why now? They hadn't run out for some weeks AFAIK.

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Team AnandTech - SETI@H, Muon1 DPAD, F@H, MW@H, A@H, LHC@H, POGS, R@H, DHEP, CPDN

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2nd - i7 4930k @4.1GHz, TR Ultra120 E, 16GB DDR3 1866, HD7870 XT 3GB(DS

[TA]Assimilator1,

So you haven't read far enough back in this thread?

The number of computers trying to download Rosetta@home tasks is now at least 10 times as much as it was a few months ago.

The project team often doesn't have enough ideas for new work to generate 10 times as many tasks as a few months ago.

Peter Hucker wrote, "I don't understand what you're getting at. You receive a task that takes 8 hours to complete, and you have to send it back in 3 days (9 times longer than it takes to do it). How can that possibly cause you not to get them done in time?

In my case, they could not be done in time because Rosetta sent me 26 tasks due in 3 days. My computer takes a little over 7 hours to complete one task. Completing them all would take 182 hours of computer time. There are only 72 hours in three days. The computer might be able to complete ten tasks in that time. The remaining 16 tasks will not be completed and will be reported as errors. (These do not include the 15 tasks that were reported as "errors while downloading," which seems to happen a lot with Rosetta, although it rarely happens with my other projects.)

Now do you understand?

Steven Gaber