Greetings:

Unfortunately, just like everyone else who's been posting recently, I'm starting to have similar difficulty with the new version of Rosetta.

I'm using a Toshiba Satellite notebook computer with nearly a hundred gigabytes of memory.

Yet, I just now woke up to see the Rosetta screensaver graphic displaying a blank form, and frozen in place.

An alert on my task bar indicated I was out of virtual memory.

Regretfully, I'm going to have to disconnect from the Rosetta project.

Thank you.

My machine (admittedly older and less powerful than the new ones) had been earning about 800 credits/day until I changed my settings to those you had recommended. Now it is earning about 750-760, so it appears that the defaults might not actually be sub-optimum. Not that I care especially about the total number of credits, except that it is apparently a measure of the level of contribution made by a cruncher.


deesy

AFAIK, settings don't affect the work done. Although, when having a shorter run time, you are less affected credit-wise (and like you said amount-of-work-done-wise) when one of your WUs fail for any given reason. (Compare a WU failing @ 19hrs of processing to a WU failing @ 2hrs of processing... Who lost the most?)

Are you seeing these changes in RAC on a 24/7 running machine? If not, then a few hours more left on/off can make such differences in RAC. ((Sometimes when you restart your PC, the WU starts a bit behind than were it left off before shutting down)(this doens't happen on 24/7 running machines)) If yes, then it's probably what I mentioned first.

Bet you haven't seen double parentheses on the work before :-)

Cogent? That was that cop show in the 70's with Telly Savalas, right?

deesy: I'd love to chat more, but seeing as you're putting on 10 years to your age and experience each time you post I'm worried for your (and everyone's) health. There was some good advice from others earlier in the thread. I will be taking it. Adieu, with all best wishes for your crunching.

My machine (admittedly older and less powerful than the new ones) had been earning about 800 credits/day until I changed my settings to those you had recommended. Now it is earning about 750-760, so it appears that the defaults might not actually be sub-optimum. Not that I care especially about the total number of credits, except that it is apparently a measure of the level of contribution made by a cruncher.


deesy

AFAIK, settings don't affect the work done. Although, when having a shorter run time, you are less affected credit-wise (and like you said amount-of-work-done-wise) when one of your WUs fail for any given reason. (Compare a WU failing @ 19hrs of processing to a WU failing @ 2hrs of processing... Who lost the most?)

Are you seeing these changes in RAC on a 24/7 running machine? If not, then a few hours more left on/off can make such differences in RAC. ((Sometimes when you restart your PC, the WU starts a bit behind than were it left off before shutting down)(this doens't happen on 24/7 running machines)) If yes, then it's probably what I mentioned first.

Bet you haven't seen double parentheses on the work before :-)

Deesy: I tried to end previously on such a positive note, but it appears little of my message got through. The time comes when I have to wonder whether the problem is with my explanation or your understanding. Looking at your responses from everyone here and the usual feedback I get, the balance of likelihood is very one-sided.

I'd taken it, when you said you worked in IT for 30+ years and were a long time IT Director, that's what you meant, so when you said there were so many (simple) things you'd never come across, it made some sense. But it seems you now have 40+ years in manufacturing too. Which is it? Getting a bit whiffy.

I think I’ll return to the BOINC defaults. They wouldn’t be defaults if they were sub-optimum, would they?

They would be lowest common denominator settings available for all projects, so of course they'd be sub-optimum. But if you think it'll solve your problems, don't let me stop you.

Is there any part of this you're actually getting, because you're doing a great job of convincing me otherwise? I'm already certain you appreciate little of logistics. Now I'm doubting if you work in IT either. Sad.

Quite possibly! Here are the parts where I agree with you:

- "In the real world of manufacturing, however, I have never seen a situation like that."
- "I believe that I made my situation clear."
- "...I am still not clear just exactly what point you’re trying to make."

Again, not a criticism. You can only know what you know and experience what you experience and it's pretty clear how limited that is. Not that it's hard to understand - I'm sure you'd pick it up straight away if the distinction of the differences was pointed out to you, but until then it's not a good idea to apply a limited understanding to scenarios where it doesn't apply. The saying "when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" applies here.

Parts that I disagree with or are misunderstood or flat wrong:

These assertions imply that I WAS crunching a task during the extended period when no Work Units were being received. That is not a valid assumption.

Just as well that wasn't stated or implied then. You seem to have a big problem with time. The above applied after you'd been re-supplied with tasks (though insufficient to fill your buffer). At the time you were totally out it was already too late to say something. Your 'set and forget' approach (perfectly legitimate) completely contradicts your need to be in work at all times. This is not the project's fault. The fault is with the parameters you set to meet your requirements.

No problem. Lesson learned. Now it's up to you to decide how to use the options Boinc (and Rosetta) provides to ensure your own req'ts are best met. Have fun!

Now, if one were to assume that the Project is like a very, very large factory, and that all of the manufacturing cells or work centers in that factory are able to process whatever inventory is available into whatever finished good is desired, then perhaps I can see your point.

The project indeed isn't like that (eg: Rosetta can't run Einstein jobs) but Boinc can. As such, the parallel you attempt to draw has no validity whatsoever so I won't dwell further on your convoluted (and inapplicable) what-if scenario - which will at least please Michael G! (In any case, the answer to your questions would be "no" or "none" or "not necessarily", but certainly not "yes" except in the most contrived of circumstances - which kind of explains why your what-ifs needed so many levels).

I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree on this one, because I am still not clear just exactly what point you’re trying to make. I appreciate your efforts to enlighten me, but our experiential backgrounds are apparently too different, and we are talking past each other.

I may've been talking past you, but you weren't talking past me. That's why I'm clear about what you're saying and am sure it's not correct, while you're not clear what I'm saying at all.

Anyway, we've talked through the whole issue pretty well in the last couple of days, even if we've made the Mod's trigger-finger get itchy along the way (sorry mod.sense!). I think if you cast your eye again over your various settings you'll be more comfortable they reflect your intentions and req'ts more fully in the light of what's been said, and you won't get anxious when things don't go smoothly in future. Somehow I'm going to guess you aren't going to stop crunching even if the site goes down completely for a couple of days. Well, if they don't, you'll know who to blame anyway! ;)

Your deliberate way of selective reading leaves me with only one conclusion: You're a troll. I won't feed you anymore.

Thanks, Jochen. It was interesting to re-read the Rosetta license agreement.

I didn't link to the license agreement, but to the Rules and Policies.
Scroll down to the bottom of the page and read the disclaimer. At least there is one in the German translation of that page. In bold letters...

And 'entitled' is what has gotten this Country into alot of problems, "undocumented aliens" think they are 'entitled' to the American Dream but then don't have to work for it. They get it thru 'entitlement' programs such as Welfare, Food Stamps, WIC, etc ,etc, etc! Is that a good thing, not to my way of thinking! Thinking anyone is 'entitled' to workunits is just not correct either, each project TRIES to provide work in a timely manner just as we users TRY to provide our pc's for them to give those workunits too. IF we users are 'entitled' to workunits wouldn't it also be true that each project is 'entitled' to a stable number of users and by extension their pc's? Meaning project A sends me work and I CANNOT move that pc to any other project and if it crashes and I am offline, or if my internet connection goes down, I then OWE the project something because they are 'entitled' to the use of my pc's. I do not think you meant to say 'entitled' in that context and may in fact wish to rethink that whole idea, IMO. 'Entitled' would seem to imply a contract between the project and yourself, meaning they supply you work and you supply them resources, that isn't the way Boinc works. A project is no more 'entitled' to the use of my pc's than I am 'entitled' to get work from them. Now IF you can find a project that will do that, please let us know, alot of us would like to make money for crunching!

Oh and there are PLENTY of charities that refuse to open their books and lose donations as a result! Several years ago the United Way in Alexandria Va got busted for misappropriating money and donations went thru the floor. They 'opened' their books and paid dearly for it. If a project does not have any workunits just move on to another one until they do, most of us have experienced long drawn out outages at most projects over the years, Rosetta is one project that has been up far more than alot of other big named projects! Seti, the place it all began, is now down 2 to days PER WEEK! They also DO NOT believe in keeping its users informed of the progress of outages, when they are back up they are back up, not before and no info will be sent out! Alot of us don't like that practice so we now crunch elsewhere, it is our choice, our pc's, our electricity, our time and our maintenance of those resources.

deesy, read this: http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/info.php
Rosetta never promised to keep your computers busy. And they never will.
Any further questions?

It seems to me you guys are making a simple process very complicated.

We sign on as users to a project, and when the project has work for us we run it. This project is amazingly reliable in providing work for all the active users. Every once in a while, the project won't have work for all of us, for whatever reason.

We aren't entitled to any certain amount of work, and we aren't entitled to explanations from the project folks. After all, we are supporting and helping the project, not adding to their workload.

Comparisons to corporate culture, or commercial web sites, simply don't apply. The project isn't a business, and we aren't paying customers.

Say you run one task at a time and you want to have another spare task made available to you as soon as you start the first one. Think of it as a KanBan in ERP terms. You call for it and you get it. Great.

But if you don't get it, you call for it again 10 minutes later, then again and again and finally after an hour, let's say, (and 6 'failures') it arrives. Is that 6 failures or not a problem at all because your first job takes 3 hours to run and the new one arrived well before the in-progress one finished?

It's a failure because it doesn't meet your criteria, but if your criteria is decided in order to allow for 20+ failures without facing a real problem then it's a success for your criteria and for your 'production'.

This, I believe, is the crux of your misinterpretation. You make no distinction when the distinction is actually everything.

In my experience, having a VP who wasn't a bit of an idiot is a rarity. Sounds like you have one of the usual ones.

First, though, you'd need to distinguish between the 'crash' over a week ago and the slow-down during all the time since. If you hadn't already assessed the difference between trivial ups and downs and built in some margin for that then you'd deserve that walk to the car. Don't sweat the small stuff and especially don't trouble the big guys with every bump and squeak. They expect you to handle that yourself.

If it's something major that requires more heavyweight intervention you can tweak some stuff (runtimes in our case here to provide more time for the big solution) or the final contingency of having a back-up project altogether. We're lucky that our machinery (Boinc) can run anything else with no changeover time.

The point being, set a safety margin that covers the small stuff and stop worrying if your safety margin is being eaten into - that's precisely what it's for. How you set your safety level depends on your situation. I'm away for half of each week so I keep 2 days usually. 1 day may be better for you if you check things each night.

If your safety margin is close to being exhausted, as long as you're sure solutions are being worked on by TPTB and you've tweaked as much as you can, it's out of our hands. At the end of the day, the loss is theirs. If you're prepared to keep a back-up project you can stay productive and returned when the problem's properly solved (looking better now, and the slow validator issue seems to have gone too).

These are a few posts that I (perhaps incorrectly) interpreted to mean that at least some posters were implying that there were no problems, and no interruptions.
This was in spite of the fact that numerous crunchers were reporting that they were not receiving Work Units. Some of these posts appear contradictory to me, and perhaps might explain my apparent confusion.

I don't see anything wrong with those statements or anyone denying that Rosetta is not performing at its usual capacity. There is indeed some contradictory phrasing used as each quote is the opinion of a different volunteer. Different people will always have a different perspective on an issue.

What does it mean when some contributors stop receiving work, while others apparently continue to receive plenty? I'm asking because I want to know, and because I believe that it is a legitimate question.

Normally Rosetta puts out an average of tens of thousands of work units an hour but at the moment appears to be generating several thousand instead. When those work units become available it is a bit of pot-luck as to who gets them. If your BOINC manager calls the server just as work is released then you will get some, if your manager calls the server a couple of minutes later there might not be any left. If you had a two day cache of work units prior to the slow down then you would have had two days in which to ask the server for more work, raising the chance of you seeing no interruption. People with no cache have no spare capacity, so they either got a new task when the last one finished or they didn't.

Your question also revolves around the issue of "plenty". I think it must be a very rare individual who has not had a reduced amount of work from Rosetta in the last week, but many supplement Rosetta with other projects to keep their cores busy. It also depends on scale; if someone with 1 computer with 1 core says, "I didn't get any work" but someone with 10 computers with multiple cores says, "I got some work but less than usual" is it any surprise that the person with more cores got more work?

In the meantime, it is an absolute fact that my computer, which runs 24/7 for Rosetta@Home, received absolutely no Work Units for a period of about two or three days beginning on August 25 or 26. The buffer was emptied, and no crunching at all was accomplished during this time. I interpret that as a stoppage, not a slowdown. If I had tried to explain a "crash" of our company's ERP system to the V.P. of Operations as a "slowdown," I would have been bounced all the way across the parking lot to my car. :-|

deesy

This is a question of perspective. For you there was a stoppage. For the project there was a slowdown (processing speed dropping to half then a third of normal). In the perspective of a super computer, which BOINC simulates, your account happens to be one set of cores in the super computer that didn't get work for a time; an unfortunate slow down of the project but hardly a complete crash of a system.

Every BOINC project breaks down or experiences difficulties now and then, which is why many people have a backup project. I am not sure why you choose not to have a backup (such as World Community Grid's Human Proteome Folding project which is directly related to Rosetta), but periods of complete inactivity are an unfortunate but inevitable consequence.

Sid Celery said:

No-one is trying to convince anyone there are no problems . . .

Jochen said:

There's nothing wrong and absolutely nothing you could do.

Evan said:

No, there is a problem with the servers. Look on the server status page
and you will see they have taken nearly all of them off line while they
make a proper fix.

Michael Gould said:

It seems that on the rosetta home page, the "Server status" box almost
always says "scheduler running," ...

Chris Holvenstot said:

Maybe, I don't know - but I can tell you from what I have seen this whole
thing amounts to nothing more than a minor slowdown - and I suspect that
a lot of the credit for it being a slowdown instead of an outage goes to
the Admins for holding things together.

Chilean said:

btw, I still have plenty of WUs in queue.

Sid Celery said:

Unless your aim is to run out of work I can't see the problem. It's the responsible thing
to do.

and also:

"No work" is false, as you confirm above.

So, what did you increase your runtime to? That's all you really needed to respond to. It's the only thing we can control and contribute from our end.