BOINC resource allocation

Questions and Answers : Windows : BOINC resource allocation
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Profile Sir Antony Magnus Project Donor
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Message 1979628 - Posted: 9 Feb 2019, 23:14:56 UTC

Hello all,

I have recently returned and been out of the loop for awhile, my question is regarding resource allocation. For instance in my case I set BOINC up for the following project priorities;

1. SETI
2. ClimatePrediction
3. Rosetta@Home
4. Einstein@Home
Now after having allocated the resources appropriately on a newly installed BOINC cruncher it downloaded large quantities of Einstein@Home which if you refer to the sequence above I have set to lowest priority settings. is this a normal way BOINC handles the resource allocations?
Ni newly returned, not newly knighted! Ni
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Message 1979642 - Posted: 10 Feb 2019, 2:43:42 UTC - in response to Message 1979628.  

BOINC allocates resources according to a percentage of 100. So if you want Seti to have the highest priority you should set it to say 60%. For example:
Seti = 60
Climate Prediction = 20
Rosetta = 15
Einstein = 5
Total = 100

Project share time is based on Recent Estimated Credit. So BOINC tries to run the projects so that all the projects produce about equal amount of credit over time. This would work well if all projects stuck to the BOINC Credit New algorithm, but many projects go their own way and assign credit on their own scales. So REC does not work as well as it theoretically should.

Einstein is one of the projects that sets their own credit per task and at a fairly high rate for the flops used to calculate the task. BOINC used to calculate credit assigned based on the number of Cobblestones it took to crunch the task but now Credit New has no relationship to flops anymore in reality.

One way to keep from getting too much work for a project it to reduce your number of days of work in your cache to very small values. Like 0.5 days of work and 0.01 days of additional work. This will keep the number of seconds of requested work small and prevent projects like Einstein from sending you too much work and preventing other projects from crunching.

Einstein is probably the worst offender. At least on my hosts. I just set NNT (no new tasks) on the project until I am running low on their work and then I request work one cycle and then reset NNT. I still normally get more work than I want so then I abort 50% of the work received right away. That way I can manage how much work I get from them.

You can also set up venues for a host to set very small cache sizes but that only works if the machine is exclusive to a project and no other projects run on the machine concurrently. The settings for all projects are global unless you set a venue for a specific machine to either Home, Office or School for exclusive preferences just for that venue.
Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

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Message 1979701 - Posted: 10 Feb 2019, 12:20:27 UTC - in response to Message 1979642.  

Thank you kindly sir, appreciate that feedback. I had forgotten that it allocated resources in the 100 percent range, for some reason or another I had it set to 200 Seti, 100 CPDN, 80 Rosetta, 40 Einstein. Not really a good setup considering that it works only within the 100 percentile range.
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Message 1979712 - Posted: 10 Feb 2019, 14:30:16 UTC

You can use the full 0-1000 range for each value, but make sure you use either % or full range for all the projects - don't mix or it will get very confusing.
Bob Smith
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Questions and Answers : Windows : BOINC resource allocation


 
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