Aborted tasks coming back?
3 Mar 2012 10:25:11 UTC
Topic 196208
(moderation:
I run Einstein on 3 computers. Two of them run anything they get. One of them is an Atom-powered netbook that does not really have any crunching power, but it does have a decent Nvidia graphics chip. So, I use that one to run CUDA-enabled BRP searches only, and abort any other task that it gets.
(It can do a CUDA task in 6 hours, and would need 68 hours for a normal BRP search; so that is obviously a waste of time on that machine.)
Until yesterday that went fine, but now it looks as if all the non-CUDA tasks I aborted are suddenly coming back. I got 37 non-Cuda tasks today. In download bandwidth alone this is extremely annoying.
For now I have set that machine to not accept new tasks, but I'm wondering if this is an error, a policy, or a fluke. Any advice is welcome.
Aborted tasks coming back?
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I think they've just started cleaning up the last few orphaned tasks from the S6Bucket run. Yes, that can result in very large downloads, as you can get tasks from many different frequency bands.
Don't abort them - stop yourself from receiving them in the first place. Prevention is better than cure.
Go to the Einstein@Home preferences page for your account. Create a new 'venue' (preference set) for your netbook to use. Set the preferences as you normally would, but specifically, change the second item so it reads
Then, go to the host details page for your netbook. Scroll down to the very bottom, and change the 'Location' to match the new preference set. Click update.
Once the netbook has got the message from the server, it won't ask for CPU work again, but will continue to run CUDA-BRP - that saves bandwidth at both ends of the line.
RE: Until yesterday that
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Well, this project's being paid to run the Gravitational Wave S6 GC tasks, so you cannot opt out of these. You can however set up on your projects preferences page to not use the CPU. Set "use CPU" to no, "Use NVIDIA GPU" to yes, and "Run CPU versions of applications for which GPU versions are available" to no. You can also uncheck the Gamma Ray search since these are CPU only tasks. As you can see, you cannot uncheck the Gravitational Wave search.
Save changes to the web site with the Update preferences button at the bottom of the page, and tell BOINC to update on Einstein, so it knows about this new decision.
As for redownloading all work, this project is one of the few (the only one, I even think) that uses locality scheduling. This means that when you've aborted work, that the data file of the tasks will stay on your system and what you 'download' is merely a pointer saying which part of the datafile we're going to work on next. These pointers are minute in size.
Only when you reset the project or do a detach/reattach or remove/add of the project, will you actually remove the old data files and have to download them again.
(lol, typing a lot slower here)
Thanks guys. That was very
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Thanks guys. That was very helpful. I have made the changes to the preferences for that machine. (I had already opted out of the Gamma tasks, but I did not realize that this was how I could opt out of other CPU tasks too.)
I will allow new tasks again and see what happens.