This is very untechnical but apart from spontaneous suspension for no reason months ago, my Rosetta (a great song by the way) and the Climate Prediction I am running on BOINC is not running smoothly as it did.

I have 200 Rosetta and 100 climate, but Climate seems to stop Rosetta running unless I suspend Climate.

Being a non-techie, but caring deeply about Rosetta, I shall either have to ditch Climate or manually suspend it every other day perhaps?

Any ideas welcome - I have the Run Always on and as per selection so not sure what to do?

best wishes

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Climate seems to stop Rosetta running unless I suspend Climate.

How long has this been the case? It is normal for BOINC to have some variance in the time blocks it allocates to the projects. It's doing the best it can. You've directed it to try and run Rosetta 67% of the time, and climate 33%. And so you should expect BOINC to run Rosetta for about 67 hours out of 100, and climate for about 33hrs. But in the short term, your milage may vary.

Basically, what I'm thinking is that the BOINC manager feels that climate is presently a little behind the 33% it was trying to achieve, and so it's giving it a few extra blocks of time to get caught up to his share (they refer to this as "debt" between projects).

I run climate as well with other projects and depending on the deadlines and number of downloaded WUs for the other projects, sometimes climate goes for 2 or 3 days with no crunch time... so he gets a shot to make that up. BOINC is aware of the "debt" to Climate, and once that debt is "paid" (by giving CPU time to Climate), then you should see a more normal pattern of switching.

This debt issue can also result in Rosetta or other projects not downloading new work. Again, no worries, it's a short term issue. Since BOINC "knows" it's going to be crunching Climate for the next day or so, there's no need to get work from other projects.

So, don't worry about it. To some extent by suspending WUs or projects, you are making BOINC more confused about what it should do. Just let it run the way it wants to for about 2 days, and then see if it doesn't come around to doing things more inline with what you were expecting.

If my description doesn't fully match your symptoms, please give some more details about what you're observing.

Crunch more Rosetta!

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Add this signature to your EMail:
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/

Climate seems to stop Rosetta running unless I suspend Climate.

How long has this been the case? It is normal for BOINC to have some variance in the time blocks it allocates to the projects. It's doing the best it can. You've directed it to try and run Rosetta 67% of the time, and climate 33%. And so you should expect BOINC to run Rosetta for about 67 hours out of 100, and climate for about 33hrs. But in the short term, your milage may vary.

Basically, what I'm thinking is that the BOINC manager feels that climate is presently a little behind the 33% it was trying to achieve, and so it's giving it a few extra blocks of time to get caught up to his share (they refer to this as "debt" between projects).

I run climate as well with other projects and depending on the deadlines and number of downloaded WUs for the other projects, sometimes climate goes for 2 or 3 days with no crunch time... so he gets a shot to make that up. BOINC is aware of the "debt" to Climate, and once that debt is "paid" (by giving CPU time to Climate), then you should see a more normal pattern of switching.

This debt issue can also result in Rosetta or other projects not downloading new work. Again, no worries, it's a short term issue. Since BOINC "knows" it's going to be crunching Climate for the next day or so, there's no need to get work from other projects.

So, don't worry about it. To some extent by suspending WUs or projects, you are making BOINC more confused about what it should do. Just let it run the way it wants to for about 2 days, and then see if it doesn't come around to doing things more inline with what you were expecting.

If my description doesn't fully match your symptoms, please give some more details about what you're observing.

Crunch more Rosetta!

Thank you for that information, I have changed the preferences to 100 each and climate is happily working away. The problem was my partner checked the usage of our computer space and even when I had suspended Rosetta it was taking 97% of disk space and my partner Dave had to keep taking Rosetta out in order to use the computer for his music recording work. (he records jazz bands!). It was rather unnerving taking Rosetta off and then it popping back up again - we renamed it HAL (do y0u really want to turn me off Dave"?)

We rebooted and it appears to be OK now, but Climate has been running for two days and Rosetta has not had a look in - but as you said, I will leave them to it, no doubt Climate is working hard to complete its work - deadline is November this year.

Thanks again, I really enjoy these two projects and feel strongly their importance, I just dont want the computer taken over, it should be on background not 97% - will check to see how much space it is taking now.

Rosy x

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Climate seems to stop Rosetta running unless I suspend Climate.

How long has this been the case? It is normal for BOINC to have some variance in the time blocks it allocates to the projects. It's doing the best it can. You've directed it to try and run Rosetta 67% of the time, and climate 33%. And so you should expect BOINC to run Rosetta for about 67 hours out of 100, and climate for about 33hrs. But in the short term, your milage may vary.

Basically, what I'm thinking is that the BOINC manager feels that climate is presently a little behind the 33% it was trying to achieve, and so it's giving it a few extra blocks of time to get caught up to his share (they refer to this as "debt" between projects).

I run climate as well with other projects and depending on the deadlines and number of downloaded WUs for the other projects, sometimes climate goes for 2 or 3 days with no crunch time... so he gets a shot to make that up. BOINC is aware of the "debt" to Climate, and once that debt is "paid" (by giving CPU time to Climate), then you should see a more normal pattern of switching.

This debt issue can also result in Rosetta or other projects not downloading new work. Again, no worries, it's a short term issue. Since BOINC "knows" it's going to be crunching Climate for the next day or so, there's no need to get work from other projects.

So, don't worry about it. To some extent by suspending WUs or projects, you are making BOINC more confused about what it should do. Just let it run the way it wants to for about 2 days, and then see if it doesn't come around to doing things more inline with what you were expecting.

If my description doesn't fully match your symptoms, please give some more details about what you're observing.

Crunch more Rosetta!

I have just checked the disk space and Rosetta has 15.88mb and Climate 1.26GB is that OK please?

thanks for your time and help, Rosyx

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I have just checked the disk space and Rosetta has 15.88mb and Climate 1.26GB is that OK please?

Sounds very normal to me. I crunch Climate too.

You mentioned 97% of disk space?? That doesn't sound possible. You need some room for Windows too. Maybe you meant 97% of your CPU time?

P.S. I liked your 200 Rosetta, 100 Climate resource share better :)

---

Add this signature to your EMail:
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/

Climate seems to stop Rosetta running unless I suspend Climate.

How long has this been the case? It is normal for BOINC to have some variance in the time blocks it allocates to the projects. It's doing the best it can. You've directed it to try and run Rosetta 67% of the time, and climate 33%. And so you should expect BOINC to run Rosetta for about 67 hours out of 100, and climate for about 33hrs. But in the short term, your milage may vary.

Basically, what I'm thinking is that the BOINC manager feels that climate is presently a little behind the 33% it was trying to achieve, and so it's giving it a few extra blocks of time to get caught up to his share (they refer to this as "debt" between projects).

I run climate as well with other projects and depending on the deadlines and number of downloaded WUs for the other projects, sometimes climate goes for 2 or 3 days with no crunch time... so he gets a shot to make that up. BOINC is aware of the "debt" to Climate, and once that debt is "paid" (by giving CPU time to Climate), then you should see a more normal pattern of switching.

This debt issue can also result in Rosetta or other projects not downloading new work. Again, no worries, it's a short term issue. Since BOINC "knows" it's going to be crunching Climate for the next day or so, there's no need to get work from other projects.

So, don't worry about it. To some extent by suspending WUs or projects, you are making BOINC more confused about what it should do. Just let it run the way it wants to for about 2 days, and then see if it doesn't come around to doing things more inline with what you were expecting.

If my description doesn't fully match your symptoms, please give some more details about what you're observing.

Crunch more Rosetta!

29th April 2006
BOINC Climate is running and Rosetta is not. The computer is so slow my partner just checked it and the Climate prog is hogging 96% of the computer - my emails are even coming through properly!

These are the messages, by the way I have downgraded the share of Rosetta from 200 to 100 which is the same for Prediction and its still taking up 96% of my computer:

29/04/2006 10:59:08||Starting BOINC client version 5.2.13 for windows_intelx86
29/04/2006 10:59:09||libcurl/7.14.0 OpenSSL/0.9.8 zlib/1.2.3
29/04/2006 10:59:09||Data directory: E:Program Files
29/04/2006 10:59:09||Processor: 1 AuthenticAMD AMD Athlon(tm) Processor
29/04/2006 10:59:09||Memory: 639.49 MB physical, 2.28 GB virtual
29/04/2006 10:59:09||Disk: 29.29 GB total, 4.73 GB free
29/04/2006 10:59:10|rosetta@home|Computer ID: 102462; location: home; project prefs: default
29/04/2006 10:59:10|climateprediction.net|Computer ID: 304035; location: home; project prefs: default
29/04/2006 10:59:10||General prefs: from climateprediction.net (last modified 1970-01-01 00:00:00)
29/04/2006 10:59:10||General prefs: no separate prefs for home; using your defaults
29/04/2006 10:59:11||Remote control not allowed; using loopback address
29/04/2006 10:59:11|climateprediction.net|Resuming computation for result hadcm3lbm_b0u6_05283569_0 using hadcm3lb version 508
29/04/2006 10:59:13||Suspending work fetch because computer is overcommitted.
29/04/2006 10:59:13||Using earliest-deadline-first scheduling because computer is overcommitted.


Shall have to take it off if I cant sort it out, which I would hate to do as I am really committed to helping these projects.

Any help or suggestion welcomed please?

Rosyxxx

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I have just checked the disk space and Rosetta has 15.88mb and Climate 1.26GB is that OK please?

Sounds very normal to me. I crunch Climate too.

You mentioned 97% of disk space?? That doesn't sound possible. You need some room for Windows too. Maybe you meant 97% of your CPU time?

P.S. I liked your 200 Rosetta, 100 Climate resource share better :)

Sorry, yes CPU time!
Its still only Climate running and the computer is still slow.

Rosyx

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Climate prog is hogging 96% of the computer - my emails are even coming through properly!

Even your EMails... are NOT coming through normally? Meaning they are slow?

The BOINC project all need CPU time. This is why they distribute the work to many machines. It's not a factor of how much disk space is needed, or network speeds for the project hosts, it always boils down to CPU time. And so BOINC projects will ALWAYS be expected to take up any CPU time your machine has.
And so 96% going to climate is normal, and expected... please read on...

When your computer's CPU is 96 or even 100% busy, it doesn't mean it is being overworked. It simply means it is being fully utilized. A computer isn't like a car. A car approaching 100% of it's maximum speed is probably about to fly apart. But your CPU has no moving parts! It's running at the speed of light, regardless of whether you've given it anything useful to do. And so all of the BOINC projects run at a LOW priority, and so they yield to other tasks on your PC that need to get work done.

Having said that, running these projects DOES sometimes back your computer a little sluggish. This is not directly because of the CPU time. It's more a factor of the memory being used. Because climate, or Rosetta, or other BOINC projects need memory to run, when they do get CPU time, because there's nothing else for your computer to do, they also take memory. In the case of both Climate and Rosetta, they take a lot of memory. So now, when you click on your EMail, it needs to bring programs in to memory in order to run, and this takes a little longer than it otherwise would, because the memory was being used by BOINC.

Now, let's get back to it... were you expecting to see 50% of your CPU running Climate, and 50% running Rosetta? BOINC just doesn't work that way. The reason is basically that it is more efficient to run one for a few hours, and then run the other for a few hours. And so you should see SOME BOINC project using nearly 100% of CPU, and which project that is will change over time.

With your current situation, your PC is a bit on the slow side and has only the minimum suggested memory for these two projects. If BOINC is impacting your normal work, you can do a couple of things.

1) In BOINC Manager, under the Commands menu, you can "suspend" BOINC. This tells it to stop running for the time being. Then do your EMail and other work and set it back to "run based on preferences". The problem is remembering to turn it back ON. If you are going to do this, I definately suggest you change your "General" settings to "leave in memory? YES". This may sound like it contradicts the comments above. But suffice it to say that "in memory" doesn't mean the memory of your PC, it means the virtual memory, which includes your paging file.

2) In your "General" preferences, you can set up a time block during the day that you want BOINC to run. So, if you use your PC on a regular schedule, like most every evening, between 6PM and 10PM, you can tell BOINC to only run outside of those hours.

Your PC is presently processing earliest deadline first. And will not fetch more work, because it feels it already has too much to do. You say it is only crunching Climate, and since climate deadlines are months away, I take it this means you have no Rosetta work left, and so the ONLY work you have left is climate.

With my experience with climate, I can tell you that the estimated time to completion has some pretty large swings up and down. Early on especially, the time to completion often INCREASES. That's right, the more I work on it, the longer the estimate that it will take to complete! Don't worry too much, once it gets about 30% of the way through the model, the estimates come back down. But this estimated time is all BOINC has to go by. And presently, with what BOINC knows about how much your PC is available to run, and the estimated time to complete that climate model, it's best guess is that you are going to have trouble completing the climate work unit before it's deadline. Yes, BOINC is predicting your present situation that far into the future.

I suspect that BOINC's experience with your computer is that it isn't available to run BOINC very many hours per day. If that is how you wish to use your computer, then Climate is not a good fit for you, because you are unlikely to finish a single work unit before it's deadline.

If you're going to start leaving your computer on all day, and give BOINC 12 or more hours of runtime, it will eventually figure out that more CPU time is available, and it will begin to project that fact into the future. This probably takes a week or more. It doesn't assume that just because your PC was on all day yesterday means it will be on all day every day next week. It takes an average over a longer timeframe.

If you are confident the climate model will have enough time to complete, or if you decide that climate isn't a good fit for how you use your computer then you could suspend the climate work unit:
go to the Work tab in BOINC
click the climate work unit
click the button on the left for "suspend"
Then connect to the internet and go to the projects tab of BOINC and click Rosetta and click the "update" button on the left, and BOINC will see that it has nothing else to do, so it had better get some Rosetta work.

Once you get some Rosetta work, then it's deadline will be first, and your machine will do 100% Rosetta until the work is completed before it returns to the climate (if you "resume" the climate WU).

In short, your computer has a slower processor, and so it is going to be difficult to divide it up amongst several projects (especially climate due to it's multi-month WU size).

If it were me, and I'm being honest here, I'd place climate on "no new work" in the projects tab, then abort the climate work unit from the work tab, then back on projects tab detach from climate. I say this because it sounds like you are going to have a hard time crunching that WU before it's deadline anyway. Also, my experience with Climate tells me your WU will likely get an error and end prematurely anyway.

Then your PC would be 100% Rosetta, and you can decide how long you'd like you crunch each WU in the Rosetta preferences.

Sorry for the lengthy essay. But I know you are new to all of this, and so wanted to explain things as clearly as it could. Hope this helps.

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Add this signature to your EMail:
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/