Curious about extended wu pending period on a recent wu
27 Jan 2015 15:18:11 UTC
Topic 197949
(moderation:
Dear Einstein@home Group.
I have a wu still pending from 2nd January 2015 and it is now 27th January 2015 so I am a somewhat curious as to why. Task LATeah0077E_80.0-84_-1.8e-11_1 work unit 208248613 Perhaps it is because I have different operating systems on different world times, or the nature of the wu itself, or the nature of the objects/area scanned in the wu, or some form of error perhaps. Whatever, it would be interesting to find out more about the wu validation process.
Thank you, Rosemary Billington.
Curious about extended wu pending period on a recent wu
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Presumably you mean this return from this workunit
The validation process here requires comparison of your return to that returned another participant (which allow cross-checking for validity). I like to the other participant your "quorum partner" though the catchy slang term "wingman" is quite popular here
In your specific case, you returned your result in well under a day on January 2. The paired Wu was issued to your first quorum partner a minute earlier on the same day. (this is not always true, sometimes the project does not send out the second unit for some time--days even).
But you first quorum partner happens currently to have very long response times (11.76 days at this writing) and in the case of the other instance of your work unit, that host never returned a result at all but instead aborting their copy on January 16.
Two minutes later the project sent out another copy to a new quorum partner. So the project delay component here was very small (it can be days).
The host statistics for that second potential quorum partner show average turnaround at the moment over 12 days, which could give a center of hoped-for return time about January 28.
The reporting times that new partner shows for this type of work have been sporadic. Possibly this host is not in continuous use, or possibly it moves among projects or applications. Still it did return three of your type of work during January 27, which had received on the 14th and 15th, so possibly yours may be returned soon.
Of course, one that host returns, it must get past first-order sanity checks, then get compared to yours. Delay can occur there (if the computer process doing the checks and comparisons are turned off, or if comparison to yours does not yield an immediate "good enough" outcome).
There are some other possible diversions and many more details--I hope this sketch helps.
I hope others here who catch an error in my reply will offer correction.