FGRP - High invalid rate on Nvidia 4090?

When you examine results on the website, there's an important bit of context that is missing - the ability to easily monitor inconclusive results.  It would be very nice to have a separate column to list these, as well as the errors and invalids.  At any point in time, if you take the number for "All" and subtract all the other categories (In Progress, Pending, Valid, etc), there may be a 'left-over' amount (hopefully very small) which can be labeled as 'Inconclusive'.  These are results described as "Checked but no consensus yet", if you search through the entire list to find them.

For the three hosts you mention, here are the numbers that existed at a certain point a little earlier today:-

As you can see, there are quite a few Inconclusives.  Some will ultimately become valid whilst others get rejected.  A lot depends on the third host that gets selected as the 'deadlock breaker'.

I've noticed increasing numbers of inconclusives in my hosts.  I ran some very limited checks and found a tendency for inconclusives to happen when the normal app was being matched against the Petri app being run under the 'anonymous platform' mechanism.  In that case, the outcome depends on the third task.  Since there is probably a greater chance it will use the regular app, the host that will probably suffer the most will likely be the one using the anonymous platform app.  Since these hosts are faster and since the number of them is likely to increase, this situation might reverse in the future if the FGRPB1G search keeps going for a while.

There might be a solution but it's probably quite unlikely to happen.  If the FGRPB1G search was split into two separate streams, one for the regular apps and one for anonymous platform apps, the ultimate rate for invalid results might improve quite a bit.  At least it might reverse the rising level of inconclusives that seems to be occurring :-).

My simple answer would be NO.  If two systems came up with exactly the SAME set of results, they would be declared 'valid' even if (technically) they were actually wrong :-).  An inconclusive result is neither right nor wrong  It's impossible to know until further results are analysed.

I'm just an ordinary volunteer like yourself.  I have no background in theoretical physics so my knowledge (such as it is) is just from what I've read or listened to.  With that disclaimer in mind, here is my take on the validation process. 

The aim of a task seems to be to return 'candidate signals' which I interpret to be related to gamma ray counts coming from from parts of the sky where there seems to be a potential peak in the count rate above the supposed background rate.  The last part of a task is to re-evaluate the top ten candidates in double precision.  This gives the immediate impression that there will always be some variability arising from different hardware/software environments so every attempt needs to be made to minimise the variations.

I don't know exactly what parameters are compared between the two results undergoing validation but it is expected that there will always be small discrepancies.  The validator uses certain 'tolerances' when doing the comparison.  If the differences are within these tolerances for all the parameters being assessed, then both tasks are declared valid.  If not, the status of both results becomes "Checked but no consensus yet" - in other words 'Inconclusive', rather than immediately invalid.

A third task is then sent out and when those results are sent back, all three sets are compared again.  The most likely outcome is that two will be found that do agree within the tolerances.  However it's entirely possible that all three might 'agree' - the third result fell in between the other two so all three are now close enough - or it could be that there is still no 'close enough' agreement and a 4th task is sent out.

The point of my post was to suggest that the standard app and the anonymous platform app might be returning results with just enough of a difference to be causing a rise in inconclusives.  If so, all parties are being disadvantaged.  The project needs to send out more 'resend' tasks than otherwise and each of the volunteers involved has the chance of an otherwise good result being rejected based on the chance event of what type of app is used to process the resend.

I don't know for sure if there really is a 'rising inconclusives' problem with the FGRPB1G search.  If people responding to Bernd's request for information about other GPU searches are not seeing rising numbers of inconclusives which ultimately leads to rising invalids, then it tends to suggest that there might be.

read back in the thread. that's been tried and no it makes no difference. still high invalids with the stock app. Same with Windows, which does not have an optimized app.

I have a gut feeling that the problem lies in the Nvidia driver, not in the application(s).

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This is an amazingly thought out explanation and makes complete sense. Thank you for taking the time to write this post. I wonder if the 4090 is coming up with a [somewhat] different list of candidates or if the issue is in the double precision evaluation. 

I will be trying one of the 4090 GPUs on some of the other GPU tasks this upcoming week to see what happens. 

I just installed new drivers a day or two ago- it will be interesting to see if anything changes. Just out of curiosity- would the workstation/professional version of the nvidia driver work on the 4090 (Linux Mint)? The A6000 Ada is the same chip, but I have no idea if anything would change or if this is possible on Linux.