WHY DOES ONE OF MY MACHINES ASK FOR CPU DESPITE PREF FOR GPU?
20 Apr 2023 19:17:05 UTC
Topic 229411
(moderation:
My machine X99SSLIPLUS was just restarted after a few days down. I made no changes to any project preferences when correcting a hardware problem. It used to ask for CPU and GPU WUs but project prefs "HOME" were set to use only one of the GPU projects. HOME is still the same (selected only Gamma-ray pulsar binary search #1 (GPU)) but now BOINC insists on asking for CPU only.
Huh? What did I do wrong?
Any help is appreciated
What was the hardware problem
)
What was the hardware problem that you corrected?
Proud member of the Old Farts Association
We cannot tell which host is
)
We cannot tell which host is your internal name. We cannot see any of the assigned venues you are using.
Give us a hostid so we can help investigate.
I just looked at all your hosts scheduler requests/replies and I didn't find any indication that you received any cpu work.
I didn't get any cpu work
)
I didn't get any cpu work because I have only the one GPU stream checked in my app prefs, and also "No CPU please" (on both machines).
They are
12878435 - my Win7Relic
and
12871209 - My X99SSLIPLUS
Thanks for looking!
The latter is the one I fixed; the BIOS selection switch somehow got changed from A to B, B had no BIOS so it hung when trying to boot. The fans were running and the lights on the GPUs were slowly blinking but it never even tried to post - without a BIOS that makes sense. When I switched the BIOS selection back to A it worked OK, except for this bug.
It cured itself. It is now
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It cured itself. It is now asking for CPU and NVIDIA WUs. This started seemingly spontaneously a couple of hours ago. Maybe it had something to do with the perceived (by BOINC) amount of work I need on this machine, perhaps if it was affected by the fact that the machine was offline for several days. Well, whatever. I am happy now.
Because the machine was off
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Because the machine was off for a while, you could have run afoul of BOINC's Recent Estimated Credit algorithm that constantly tries to balance credits among projects and applications.
The default for the REC parameter in the cc_config.xml file is way too much at 10 days half-life in my opinion.
I always change that on all my hosts to a single day. That makes the host balance out the credit imbalances much faster than the stock value.
This is the parameter in <Options> <rec_half_life_days>1.000000</rec_half_life_days>
Ten days might have been the correct value for when BOINC was originally created for cpu only projects at the time, but in the current environments of both gpu and cpu applications, ten days is the incorrect value.