I am running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 on a machine with two hyperthreaded 3.06GHz Xeon Processors (the ones with a 1 MByte L3 Cache), so my Linux kernel treats this as a 4-processor machine. Consequently, I have my preferences set to run up to 4 processors. There is 4 GBytes RAM on the machine.

Now ever since the 5.2* series of the BOINC client came out, the scheduler in it has been acting more reasonable, and is running 4 instances of the climateprediction.net application. Three of these (the sulfur cycle ones) require A LOT of cpu time, and have short (4 months or so) deadlines. The old (4.3.* series) BOINC client did not schedule well, and these sulfur cycle applications progressed too slowly because the client insisted on getting other work from other applications and these had shorter deadlines and caused the sulfur cycle applications to be deferred. It seemed as though the scheduler looked only at the deadlines and ignored estimated time to completion.

Now the new 5.2 series does a little better with this.
When I got the first one, it immediately entered overcommitted mode, let the near-term deadline applications to finish, then refused to download any new work until today, running the four climateprediction.net applications. I had some hope that the three sulfur cycle applications might finish. But today, it finished the regular climateprediction application (hadsm3um, I think it is called), and proceeded to download some rosetta and some predictor@home work. That might have been OK, if it decided to run those on the now-spare processor. But id did not do that. Since the new work has a shorter deadline, it stopped all execution of the sulfur cycle stuff and put all 4 processors to work on the new stuff.

My guess is that it should have downloaded less work, just enough that the single free processor could do it in the time allowed, and let the other three processors continue with the sulfur cycle work. But it did not.

THIS REALLY NEEDS TO BE FIXED. I am going to miss the deadlines for the sulfur cycle stuff that are due in mid January 2006. These all have predicted remaining times of around 1400 hours, 2240 hours, and 3850 hours. Even if they get all three processors all the time, they may not finish by the deadline.

It is true that those three processes run faster than the estimates, but not so much faster that I can be confident they will finish by the deadline. But with these other processes taking all four processors instead of just the spare one, I am going to be in big trouble, even if the climateprediction.net project accepts late results (I got the impression that they would).

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If that's an issue with BOINC why do you post this here in the SETI@Home forum ?
SETI@Home has nothing to do with that.

Take a look at the BOINC forum.
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

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Join BOINC United now!

If that's an issue with BOINC why do you post this here in the SETI@Home forum ?
SETI@Home has nothing to do with that.

Take a look at the BOINC forum.
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

Great idea, but I cannot manage to log in on that site. I can look at what is there, but to post anything it now requires the I supply a login and password. It did not like any that I tried. It suggested an account code, and I tried my setiathome one and it will not take that either. I then assumed they wanted me to establish a new account, and I could not find how to do that.

OOPS! I found it.

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