E@H disrespecting our benevolence
4 Jun 2010 6:56:04 UTC
Topic 194958
(moderation:
I have been crunching data for E@H for some years now on a 2.8GHz PC. The most recent unit required around 24 hours to process. This is acceptable to me and until now I have no cause for complaint. However, today when I requested new data to crunch, something like 25 files (each about 4Mb) started to download. While I have in the past been happy to offer my processing cycles, I am now reconsidering whether my benevolence is being abused. E@H now goes on the far back burner. If when I retry to download an acceptable work task (say <25MB) I am again inundated with excessive data I will scrub E@H altogether, unless that is if E@H is willing to pay for all incurred data download charges from my ISP. Don't get too greedy!
E@H disrespecting our benevolence
)
Hi!
Sorry for your inconveniences, and I understand your concerns.
Hopwever, it's important to know that E@H (and all other projects) are not pushing tasks to your computer at will, it's the other way round: your BOINC client is requesting new tasks, so the BOINC software is in the driving seat here, not the project server.
Luckily, there are several means to put a break on when you feel BOINC is requesting to much:
* BOINC allows to limit the filespace used by BOINC to any limit you choose (absolute or relative as fraction of the disk size). By putting a limit there, excessive downloads are prevented.
* resource share: if you want your PC to spend more time crunching for projects with a smaller footprint, you can lower the resource share of E@H, which will also reduce the network traffic.
All these settings are accessible in the web settings http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/prefs.php?subset=global
As for the downloaded files: The data files that E@H is processing ARE kind of huge, yes. To minimize the effect on users, the E@H server tries hard to assign jobs to your host that use the data files that you already have. This means: you will not get so many files with every new task. You might get several new tasks now without having to download new data files for a while, or download only a few, but not the whole bunch.
There are also some BOINC versions which have a tendency (you may call it a bug) to request more work than the host can probably handle in time. So it's a good idea to periodically check for the newest BOINC software.
I hope this could mitigate your concerns a bit,
HB