1) Message boards : News : Pchd Chriss Belczyński passed away... (Message 6355)
Posted 16 Jan 2024 by mikey
Post:
I also would like to express my condolences!!
2) Message boards : Number crunching : Universe@Home Computing Credits Not Updating (Message 6186)
Posted 27 May 2023 by mikey
Post:
There is no credit.

I have not received anything in ages, it seems.
At least according to BOINCstats.

Have you checked this option under your project prefs?

Do you consent to exporting your data to BOINC statistics aggregation Web sites?


I had not. I run multiple other projects and they all seem to have this on by default, so I was not aware such a setting even existed.
I have now turned it on. We shall see how much of an effect it has.

Thank you for the tip.


Most Projects that have users from Europe require that setting to comply with their data gathering rules, it's not in the same place at every Project though so you have to search for it.
3) Message boards : Number crunching : Milestones (Message 5736)
Posted 6 Aug 2022 by mikey
Post:
I guess I have some work to do here!!!
4) Message boards : Number crunching : Server Thread (Message 5626)
Posted 23 May 2022 by mikey
Post:

Be care there are ALOT of very close to personal attacks going on in here.

We can have diverse purposes but still enjoy the crunching and the competition to pass each other

My Team is called The Final Front Ear which is obviously a play on Star Trek but we are NOT trekkies, we are just a bunch of people who enjoy crunching and needed a catchy name for a Team. We have people that have a single laptop to people like me who have a 'computer room' in the garage with it's own mini-split ac system to keep it cool and all kinds of people inbetween, the people are from all over and we are an International Team.


It's a clever name. I definitely thought you guys were Star Trek fans.

Our team consists of a similar demographic of users. All just as important as the next.


Star Trek fans makes sense. People who live in Germany makes sense. People who like a review site (Anandtech) is idiotic.


Have you ever been to their site, it's fricking huge or was the last time I went there, it's kinda like the site Guru3D.com
5) Message boards : News : Longer work units (Message 5625)
Posted 23 May 2022 by mikey
Post:
Has the huge backlog been cleared up yet? I am still get project back off every time I try to upload. Here is my log of my last few attempts.

5/23/2022 12:22:41 PM | | Project communication failed: attempting access to reference site
5/23/2022 12:22:42 PM | | Internet access OK - project servers may be temporarily down.
5/23/2022 12:22:42 PM | Universe@Home | Temporarily failed upload of universe_bh2_190723_400_528884472_20000_1-999999_885100_1_r1963607943_1: transient HTTP error
5/23/2022 12:22:42 PM | Universe@Home | Backing off 00:25:18 on upload of universe_bh2_190723_400_528884472_20000_1-999999_885100_1_r1963607943_1
5/23/2022 12:22:42 PM | Universe@Home | Temporarily failed upload of universe_bh2_190723_400_528884472_20000_1-999999_885100_1_r1963607943_0: transient HTTP error
5/23/2022 12:22:42 PM | Universe@Home | Backing off 00:19:13 on upload of universe_bh2_190723_400_528884472_20000_1-999999_885100_1_r1963607943_0


All of mine cleared several days ago but that "transient HTTP error" means their website is down or unreachable at the moment.
6) Message boards : News : Longer work units (Message 5618)
Posted 22 May 2022 by mikey
Post:
EDIT- ok, things here at the Universe forums are rather odd. Every other project i've seen when you click on someone's account, it shows you all of the projects they are with .


That's Project choice on the Server side to show that or not
7) Message boards : Number crunching : Server Thread (Message 5616)
Posted 22 May 2022 by mikey
Post:
You missed the point. A loyalty to a country is being patriotic. A loyalty to a review site is pathetic.


No, you have no point. Much like you have no friends. So you tell yourself joining a "country" team is better because it's the only thing you have in common. Unlike having real friends whom form a team from similar interests.

All you got is the place you entered this world in.


Be care there are ALOT of very close to personal attacks going on in here.

We can have diverse purposes but still enjoy the crunching and the competition to pass each other

My Team is called The Final Front Ear which is obviously a play on Star Trek but we are NOT trekkies, we are just a bunch of people who enjoy crunching and needed a catchy name for a Team. We have people that have a single laptop to people like me who have a 'computer room' in the garage with it's own mini-split ac system to keep it cool and all kinds of people inbetween, the people are from all over and we are an International Team.
8) Message boards : Number crunching : Server Thread (Message 5518)
Posted 18 May 2022 by mikey
Post:
The problem is now in very large number of concurrent HTTP connections.
Our server handles about 300 simultaneous connections and it is maximum what it can do.

Setting more makes server very unstable (in terms of deamons, not machine or operating system) and cause more problems then it solve.

Most (if not all) BOINC documented method of increasing server performance I have already implemented, but we are limited by network and what system can handle.


Hi

I am sure that for just a small-ish outlay, you could have separate dedicated servers for the website and message board and then another one or two for upload/downloads as well as for the validator(s). I am sure there are those within the BOINC community who can help with setting ths up.

(The SETI@home project did exactly this and it worked well most days...and that is/was a much bigger project with far more active users and bandwidth).

regards
Tim


As with most projects the problem is money, I don't know if they have a donate here link but it might help
9) Message boards : Number crunching : Project has no tasks available (Message 5515)
Posted 17 May 2022 by mikey
Post:
supddod wrote


The only benefit of option 2 is if you are a jerk and want to play the probabilities, and are treating the whole thing like a game instead of a fun way to get more science done. At major competitions, there will always be more tasks returned by other teams compared to your team. I have heard of some folks engaging in the behaviour during these competitions that they pull down as many extra caches that they can with no intention of crunching them, the only purpose being to avoid validation of those work units during the competition. It is highly more likely that those tasks will belong to work units assigned to other teams compared to your own.

I, too, have been around BOINC for a number of years (closing in on 8) and have participated in multiple competitions. I agree with you completely that essentially all participants are here to advance the science and would have no part in option 2. That, however, doesn't preclude that there are some bad actors, and I was simply presenting two potential explanations to what pawg was seeing. As noted above, these turned out to be bunkering systems, as expected.


First Thank You for sticking with it!!

And some of us are pushing nearly 40 years, challenges are one way to get ALOT of new users to look at a project that they might not normally pick and then come back post Challenge. And easy thing for people not participating in the Challenges is to keep an eye on what Projects are involved and to avoid them for the time of the Challenge. the Pentathlon ends at midnight the 19th GMT https://www.seti-germany.de/boinc_pentathlon/ BTW this is the 13th year of the Pentathlon so you should have heard about it before.

As for "bunkering" it's a common thing especially with people who pay extra for their internet at certain times than other times, that means it's cheaper to crunch for Boinc if they can limit their connectivity choices. Not everyone lives in the high tech wifi and cable internet everywhere World, as long as the tasks are returned prior to their deadline no one cares except when Challenges come along and then alot of us are trying to get new tasks and returned our completed ones before it ends. As Grant said if you add in the 'bonus' given for this or that Project and "bunkering" is how your Team wins!!

Before it was outlawed we even did 'sneaker nets' where one pc would download ALOT of tasks and then we would use floppy disks to transfer them to other pc's to crunch them then copy them back again to the original pc to return them and get new tasks, that involved ALOT of "bunkering". That was back in the dial-up days mostly though I did use it until internet cables became cheap enough to run to every pc.
10) Message boards : Number crunching : Project has no tasks available (Message 5513)
Posted 17 May 2022 by mikey
Post:
My earlier comment was prompted by the comment above it that said "The only benefit of option 2 is if you are a jerk and want to play the probabilities". It was intended to make people engaged in the competition think about their own actions, the effect they have on others, and what those others may be thinking as a result. I apologise if my analogy was not quite perfect enough for those trying to justify their actions with lengthy posts. As someone not engaged in the competition, I just see a two week long DDOS attack on an innocent internet service, and the whys and wherefores of that attack are irrelevant. Indeed, the people who never return a result are arguably less of a problem because at least they create a lesser overload of the available bandwidth.

Personally I certainly don't have a problem with people running competitions (and I would imagine that applies to other commenters on this thread and others who are are fed up with the effects of this competition), but how about playing nicely, and not creating chaos for two weeks? Why not limit the competition to one day per BOINC project, for example?


Each Project selected for the Challenge is given a heads-up at least 2 weeks ahead of time and has the right to say 'no thanks', Challenge Projects are not chosen randomly but instead to give the Project a boost and some new 'eyes on' so that post Challenge some people just might stay.

The problem with your one Project a day idea is that just about the time you get all 300 of your pc's setup it's time to stop getting new tasks and abort the existing ones so you can get new tasks from the next Project, I think that could be even worse for the Projects involved. Now a 3 or 4 day maximum Challenge per Project would work I think.
11) Message boards : Number crunching : LOOK OUT!!!! Pentathlon! (Message 5511)
Posted 17 May 2022 by mikey
Post:
Oops server overload, at least it didn't crash and the website still works. 150 tasks failed to upload over 24 hours, tried many times.

Have we found another bottleneck or has something blown up?


Too many users for the hardware, they have plenty of hardware for normal everyday stuff but not nearly enough for challenges that bring double the normal users.
12) Message boards : Number crunching : LOOK OUT!!!! Pentathlon! (Message 5510)
Posted 17 May 2022 by mikey
Post:
Oops server overload, at least it didn't crash and the website still works. 150 tasks failed to upload over 24 hours, tried many times.

Have we found another bottleneck or has something blown up?


As far as I can tell it is the same issue we have had all during the Pentathlon. Except the U@H messages website is running somewhat better than the Einstein@Home messages website.

Tom M


I believe Einstein is MUCH better today than yesterday
13) Message boards : Number crunching : Tasks Not Uploading (Message 5509)
Posted 17 May 2022 by mikey
Post:
Some teams are performing a de facto DDoS attack on the server (they are calling it a Penthatlon), so it is almost impossible to upload or report anything.

This attack is ongoing since 2 weeks.

Nothing do that about, other than wait for the attack to stop, unfortunately.


Some people take challenges, especially Team ones, seriously and yes they can bring hundreds of machines and thousands of cpu cores to them that are normally spread out across the projects so they just keep crunching. I used to work for a local government that had 10k pc's that they replaced every year, they did that for 4 years and then started over again, so 40k pc's total. They ALMOST let me bring them to Boinc until the local electric utility gave them a subsidy if they would shut down at least x number every night, Boinc lost out!!

There are also people working for cpu companies that will bring a new cpu to Boinc to test it out, the last one I saw was a 128/256 core cpu running 128 versions of Linux virtually.
14) Message boards : Number crunching : Server Thread (Message 5508)
Posted 17 May 2022 by mikey
Post:
I find the whole situation utterly ridiculous. I have not been able to upload or download anything from the server for 6 days now.


It's a challenge, that means ALOT of people who don't normally crunch here, or bring nearly as much hardware if they do, are now here and banging on the door just like you and I are. Right now there are over twice as many people as there are normally here, and that doesn't even count the dozens of pc's and hundreds/thousands of cpu cores people bring to challenges. On the 20th things will get better as the challenge will be over on the 19th.
15) Message boards : Number crunching : Server Thread (Message 5507)
Posted 17 May 2022 by mikey
Post:
It is so bad that first I set the project to no new tasks.
Now I have additionally suspended the entire project so as to generate no new uploads. I will not resume the project until all my uploads have gone through, I have at least two screens full of them. Occasionally one or two go through. Iff I baby sit them.

It is so bad I could not even post this: took three tries.


And during challenges that's the most obvious thing to do, I used to do it for every challenge, I would check to see what projects they are running, you can see it here https://www.seti-germany.de/boinc_pentathlon/ and just don't crunch for those projects unless I am participating in the challenge too
16) Message boards : Number crunching : Server Thread (Message 5506)
Posted 17 May 2022 by mikey
Post:
I don't really mind the upload getting stuck for a day or so, but BOINC prevents me from getting new tasks because of the upload hampering: Mon 16 May 2022 02:09:32 PM CEST | Universe@Home | Not requesting tasks: too many uploads in progress
I'm running out of tasks in a few hours. Shame


I think that could be adjusted for the challenges if they want too, that way the downloads could still come thru without the uploads being uploaded first
17) Message boards : Number crunching : Project has no tasks available (Message 5374)
Posted 9 May 2022 by mikey
Post:
I've noticed quite a lot of strange hosts without credit but with around 1000 tasks in progress

There are two likely explanations for this:
1. Folks participating in the Pentathlon who have never contributed to Universe before. They may be holding the tasks in reserve to release them at a certain point (three days out of the two week event have bonus points for results returned).
2. Some individuals use underhanded tactics: they create BOINC clients, load up the client with as many tasks as they can, and then simply hold the tasks until timeout. They have no intention of ever returning the tasks; they are trying to preclude validation of the work units for those tasks during the competition to reduce the overall credits earned by participants, thus increasing the relative value of credits within the competition timeframe. Personally, I think if that behavior is caught and confirmed that they should be banned. Clearly, the number of credits means more to them than the science, so hit them where it (presumably) hurts them. Turn their BOINC account and all its credits to anonymous.


Option 2 I think
https://universeathome.pl/universe/show_host_detail.php?hostid=623038[/url]


The Admin said he's on the limit of what he can do, the problem is each transaction takes time and there's only so much time per day on the Server.
18) Message boards : Number crunching : Server Thread (Message 5311)
Posted 6 May 2022 by mikey
Post:
It looks like my uploads are stalled.


And when I cycled the Network connectivity everything started moving again. The joys of a 20 second rest.

----edited---
Spoke too soon. Stalled again.


It is in 1-3 hour back off.

Have run completely out of tasks.

Tom M


Focus on the downloads and then at least you can crunch, just keep clicking retry until they come thru
19) Message boards : Number crunching : LOOK OUT!!!! Pentathlon! (Message 5310)
Posted 6 May 2022 by mikey
Post:
Uploading unsurprisingly completely stuck


Mine go thru but not without lots of intervention so I stopped worrying about the uploads and concentrated on the stuck downloads and they finally came thru for me
20) Message boards : News : Longer work units (Message 5309)
Posted 6 May 2022 by mikey
Post:
Haha ha hah. Yes we all weeped when they halved the credits last year after the whinging from the ULX task crunchers complained about task credit inequity compared to BHSpin2 tasks for approximate equal runtimes.


I wish they would bring back the ULX tasks again, I still need some hours to get my 50k badge on wuprop


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