I signed on to the rosetta@home project about a week ago. Since that time the only message I receive from the BOINC manager is "communication deferred". I am now receiving the same message from the set@home project. Originally the seti@home project did perform work for 4-5 days after signing on to rosetta@home. Now for 2-3 days I am twiddling my thumbs. Can anyone help?

John Karaffa
john@nursebrokers.com

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Sorry it took so long for someone to notice your post. It looks (from your RAC) like you're crunchin' well now!

Looks like 8 others clicked the button saying they have this question too, so I thought that, in spite of the fact that this response is not in time to help John, that others would like to see an answer.

One cause of this is when you attach to multiple projects with BOINC. It has numerous side effects on how BOINC goes about doing the scheduling of how much CPU time to allocate to each project.

For example, you start out with only SETI, for 100% resource share. So, you download enough work to keep SETI busy 100% of the next X days (where you've specified X in your general preferences for "connect to network every... days"). So, let's say for example you've set it to 1 day. BOINC downloads 1 day of work for SETI....

Then you add Rosetta (thanks), and now (by default anyway) your resource shares are 50/50. So, what used to be 1 day of work for SETI will now take TWO days to complete... which is more than the original estimate. In some cases, the addition of the new project causes BOINC to believe it may miss some of the deadlines of your existing WUs (you'll see a message indicating it is using "earliest deadline first scheduling"). And since you have no Rosetta work yet, it isn't the earliest deadline you have, and so Rosetta doesn't get any attention until AFTER some of the existing work is crunched and completed.

To "make up" for this "lost time" to Rosetta, BOINC keeps track of "debt". And allows the projects to "borrow" time from each other in order to meet deadlines. These debts are later "repaid", in this case by giving Rosetta more than 50% of day, once the SETI work has cleared.

There is an FAQ on the subject.

It is also discussed at length in the [url=http://boinc-wiki.ath.cx/index.php?title=Main_Page ]BOINC Wiki[/url]
and also a link specifically about EDF

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Running Microsoft's "System Idle Process" will never help cure cancer, AIDS nor Alzheimer's. But running Rosetta@home just might!
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/