Stuck in last gear

Thanks for creating your own thread and thanks for allowing others to see the details of your computer.

I've had a look through your list of tasks and it looks pretty normal apart from one particular aspect which I'll talk about later on.

Firstly, you have completed tasks for the gamma-ray pulsar search and more recently you've been doing the O2AS gravitational wave search.  Was that a deliberate change of preferences on your part or do you have both searches enabled in your preferences and the scheduler may have just decided to give you some tasks for the alternate choice?

Before you just "go back to the old ones", please understand that you do have a choice and that perhaps understanding what those two searches are about might influence that choice.

The 'holy grail' for this project is the first detection of continuous GW emissions.  It's what the whole project is ultimately all about.  During the many years of upgrading the sensitivity of the LIGO detectors, the project developed the ability to detect previously unknown pulsars (of the radio- as well as gamma-ray variety) and continues to do that successfully.  More than 50 previously unknown objects have been discovered by these interim searches.  This was nothing to do with GW emissions but it is expected that these massive bodies will also be emitting continuous GW.

Now we have much more sensitive LIGO instruments and the data from the 2nd observational run (O2) gives the best chance that there could be a discovery of the continuous GW emissions of spinning massive objects like neutron stars.

The tasks for O2AS GW search are more computationally intensive and do take longer than the gamma-ray pulsar tasks - perhaps twice as long.  But that's not a problem in itself.  Your tasks list shows the times involved and those times are well short of the task deadline.  The real question to ask your self is what aspect of this scientific endeavour is of most interest to you?  The first ever detection of continuous GW is going to be a really big deal when it happens.  You have the chance to participate in that.  The choice about that is entirely up to you.

There are no errors in the tasks shown in your tasks list.  I've never heard of an "Error-1".  Is it a Windows error message of some sort?  Where exactly is it produced?  Can you copy and paste some 'context' so that we can at least see exactly what bit of software gives this message and what other details there are that go with it?

The 2nd example you give is quite possibly something to do with BOINC since there are a lot of .xml files used for configuration and control - eg client_state.xml, cc_config.xml, global_prefs.xml, app_config.xml to name but a few.  Have you been editing any files with a .xml extension?  Are you running any 3rd party software that might be interacting with BOINC stuff?  It looks like something may have introduced a syntax error when modifying one of these files.  Once again, exactly what software shows the error message and is there a filename mentioned for the file where the error is detected?  Are there other parts of the message that give some context?  Copy and paste further details that might give that information, please.

Did you try stopping BOINC completely and then restarting it?  Sometimes a task may be apparently stuck.  Suspending it doesn't really do anything useful but stopping BOINC completely causes the task (when restarted) to be reloaded from a saved checkpoint on disk.  If that doesn't work, rebooting the computer is a way of totally clearing what might be in memory that's interfering with the task's progress.

From the data you provided, I've extracted what I think might be relevant:-

If you look at the tasks in your tasks list (link earlier in the reply) you can see a large difference between CPU time and Run Time for all returned tasks. It's quite normal for there to be a relatively modest difference because occasionally, the task that is crunching may lose some CPU cycles when other higher priority work has to be attended to.  The size of that difference in your case seems abnormally large.  So is the variation between run times of similar tasks that would be expected to take pretty much the same amount of time.

Here is a good example.  Task ID LATeah0057F_1352.0_710289_0.0_2 took 33,408 secs and used 27,259 secs CPU time.  Further down, Task ID LATeah0057F_1512.0_214090_0.0_1 took 44,998 secs and used 31,040 secs CPU time.  I would expect those two tasks (using the same data file LATeah0057F.dat) to take pretty much the same time.

So the question I would ask is, "Are you running any other compute intensive work when BOINC is crunching?".  I'm not talking about ordinary day to day stuff like 'office work', web-browsing, email, document creation, printing, etc.  Those use very little CPU.  I'm talking about something seriously heavy in CPU use.

If you are, then that would explain the results in your tasks list.  BOINC is just getting out of the road when you have more important things to do.  If you're not,  perhaps you need to find out why the big differences and variations.  Perhaps it might be something to do with malware that you don't realise is running without your consent.

These differences and variations have reached a much higher level in the task you suspended (data snip above).  The task is listed as 99% complete so rebooting your computer and allowing it to run might finish it rather quickly.  The concern is that the current CPU time for it is 59,879 secs whilst the Run Time is 152,759 secs.  So there is something preventing it from having the extra CPU seconds that would allow it to complete - while the elapsed time keeps ticking over.  It could be a flaw in the task itself but I think it's far more likely to be something else like malware or mis-configuration elsewhere in your system.

Notice that the 2 GW tasks you have returned both used about 60k secs of CPU time.  This one you suspended seems to be very close to that same amount of CPU time - a good reason for rebooting and giving it a bit more time to complete.