TASKS FOR COMPUTER page explanation
27 Dec 2023 9:44:17 UTC
Topic 230547
(moderation:
Hi, Great to be part of this project. I started contributing to this project in November, using a very old Pentium 4 computer that was gathering dust in my attic, configured to just perform BOINC headless. One thing that confuses me is the TASKS FOR COMPUTER page , which doesn't seem to display all the tasks I have performed. I completed some in November, and in early December but these no longer appear in the list ? Are these dropped if no validation occurs within the time allowed ? Perhaps the page is a rolling list, but for a while I had some listed from late november, with none from the first two weeks of december ?
If I divide my total credit by average , I get a number which suggests more tasks have been completed than are show on the Tasks page i,e 16,632/709.12 = 23.45 which is roughly twice what are currently listed.
What is the criteria for a task appearing on the tasks page ?
https://einsteinathome.org/host/13165453/tasks
Thanks you
Jonathan Ives wrote:Hi,
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WELCOME to Einstein!!
Because there are thousands of tasks being completed every day they move tasks to off-line storage after they are completed and validated. Tasks here at Einstein each require a 'wingman' which means that you get a task and someone else also gets the same task, the results the two of you send back must be within some metric the Project has decided that task should have or they will send it out to a 3rd, 4th etc person until the task is either proven to be valid or invalid. Once the final result is in the task is moved to off-line storage. Here is part of what I see when I click on the Task ID on the website for a given task:
Workunit 769197401
You can see the task was sent out to 2 people initially but can be sent out to up to 20 different people to get it completed and valid. This particular task took 5 people to complete and validate.
Each type of task can have a different Max # of error/total/success numbers behind it and you can look at yours on the website.
Your numbers probably don't match up when you divide by the credit to get the number of tasks you did because your pc didn't return a 'valid' result for some of the tasks. This can become a problem if the errors are consistent and others can help you figure out those problems better than I can.
Thanks Mikey, That
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Thanks Mikey,
That explains what I'm seeing. is there a way to how many tasks I've performed in total ? I can see total credits and average credit, but I don't see a total tasks completed
Jonathan Ives wrote: Thanks
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I don't think so, one problem could be that then people woud want to sort it by this that or some other metric creating alot of work for the servers to keep track of. According to this page https://www.boincstats.com/stats/5/project/detail/ there are almost half a million total Einstein crunchers.
Jonathan Ives wrote: Thanks
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https://einsteinathome.org/account/dashboard -- TASKS
will bring up a listing of all the tasks that have been assigned to you (minus the ones that have been cleaned from the system, of course).
You can sort by the order the tasks were sent to you by clicking once on the SENT column (earliest first) or clicking twice for most recent first.
I'm not aware of any place where you can get the total number of tasks you've ever completed.
hadron wrote: Jonathan Ives
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Yes, you can easily find the number of tasks ever completed by the current BOINC installation on a particular machine. The data will be in a file called job_log_einstein.phys.uwm.edu.txt which you will find in the directory where the BOINC client is installed.
The file is plain text with each line representing a completed task. There are a number of data fields identified with a 2 character 'label' (except for the very first field). That first field is a time stamp (seconds after the Unix epoch) for when the task was returned. The file gets updated whenever tasks are returned.
There are online converters for seconds from Unix epoch (00:00:00 January 1, 1970) to current date - just google it. The number of lines in the file will tell you just how many tasks the installation on that machine has completed. After the time stamp, each of the other fields is preceded by a label.
As an example, I just grabbed the very first line from the log file on a machine I built back in 2008 that is still running today. The file has 402K lines so that's how many tasks it has returned. The machine has a Q6600 core2 quad CPU and it was running GW CPU tasks back in 2008. GPU tasks didn't exist until later :-). Here is what that line shows:-
1222553378.157728 ue 23216.982644 ct 23793.030000 fe 57521499174367.203125 nm h1_1163.90_S5R4__1167_S5R4a_1Out of interest, I threw that Unix time stamp into a converter and it gave Sunday, September 28, 2008 8:09:38 AM. That's when I first built that machine.
The format of the file has changed somewhat over the years. Here is what the very last line from today shows:-
1703831080 ue 27821.621622 ct 112.991400 fe 450000000000000 nm Ter5_1_dns_cfbf00022_segment_3_dms_200_40000_65_6500000_0 et 1512.445868 es 0I think the meanings of the labels are ue=user estimate, ct=cpu time, fe=flops estimate, nm=name of task. The 2nd example has et=elapsed time which would have come in to allow for the fact that GPU tasks may have much larger run times compared with the actual recorded cpu time. I'm not sure what es stands for but I don't think it's used at Einstein.
I hope this may be of interest to anyone who wants to review their entire history :-).
Cheers,
Gary.
Many thanks Gary for the very
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Many thanks Gary for the very full explanation, that’s exactly what I was looking for