The server is out of work and a Formula Boinc sprint is in progress.

We need tasks!

The server is out of work and a Formula Boinc sprint is in progress.

We need tasks!

The way we produce work is rather complicated (computationally speaking), at the moment this is the maximum pace we can achieve.

I didn't know about Formula BOINC Sprint but I noticed a huge increase of workunit requests.
For your reference the current pace of the work generator is actually around 488 new workunits every 15-18 minutes.

Hello, about available work, it is very easy to understand !
Since the project on "Sprint" is known, some very big team with hundreds of hosts, downloaded the most WU.
But not returned it. I will not write the name of such teams. There are knowns.
But those team, runs the WU without returning them. They wait the official start
to upload all WU crunched the past day. It is they strategy !!!
They take all WU, wait, and when there are again available WU, it is not enough for normal user to increase.

Then about the amount of WU / host, increase cache will nothing change.
The project limits 8 simultanous WU / core.
So with a 8cores, you only can receive 64 WU. I agree with this politics.
So WU stay not too long out in field.

The problem is with a "Sprint" Some team with hundreds of hosts, take all WU, then returns it during soprint, then after do NOTHING for the project.
Then they crunch only for personnal ranking, wait the next 3sprint" and do the same again...

Look only the stats on Formula BOINC, in all divisions !!!
Look very carefully the ranking stats on "Sprint"

It explain why a lot of people have difficults to get WU.
The server produce WU normally, like each normal day and it is enough.
So, the server is not in overload. It is very wise from Admin. And I says again, i fully agree.

T6he look the stats from the latest 24Hr !! 20 new users but strange 174 hosts !!!
Easy to count : Let us start that there are also honnest users .
But then after less than one day, each new user is connected with about 15 hosts !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Very strange !

Best regards

For your reference the current pace of the work generator is actually around 488 new workunits every 15-18 minutes.

Hello marsinph !

I'm a member of team Alliance Francophone consisting of volunteers from many countries who are using the french language. I live in Strasbourg, France.

I think that your argument that "some teams with hundreds of hosts, take all WU (you mean "take before the sprint starts",I think), then return them during the sprint." is not quite true, because Formula Boinc generally announces the selected project only when the exact day and time (in UTC, that is the former United Kingdom based Greenwich mean time) is reached.

The current TN-Grid Plaform sprint is an exception to the rule. While consulting the Formula Boinc page on 12 Sept 2018 at 22:00 UTC I saw that the project had been announced at least 18 hours before 13 Sept 2018 16:00 UTC ! I don't know why this happened.

Even knowing the project in advance, I did not try to download work units beforehand as I considered it unethical. I even didn't try to see the number of tasks currently ready to send because I always thought that work units downloaded before the official would be disqualified.

Having been delayedby by an urgent task at my work, I only started requesting tasks from my home at 17:04 UTC and got zero tasks. Minutes later, I saw zero tasks ready to send on the project's, then saw your message. Just before sending my answer, I found that my Boinc Manager had got 4 tasks at 17:17 UTC having been crunched almost 75% at 21:50 UTC.

That's more then I feared !

Keep up the good work !
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@Marko Sango,
the project which is chosen for a Formula BOINC sprint is announced exactly 24 hours before the start of each sprint. (Except when Sebastien forgets to update the site.)

A reminder at when exact date and time the next sprint project will be announced is appearing at the Formula BOINC site a week in advance of each sprint.

@Marko Sango,
the project which is chosen for a Formula BOINC sprint is announced exactly 24 hours before the start of each sprint. (Except when Sebastien forgets to update the site.)

A reminder at when exact date and time the next sprint project will be announced is appearing at the Formula BOINC site a week in advance of each sprint.

Number of tasks in progress:
- was constantly at 30,000 for many days until Tuesday
- went to 35,000 on Wednesday for no apparent reason
- steadily climbed to almost 70,000 since the sprint announcement until now, and is still rising

valterc wrote:

For your reference the current pace of the work generator is actually around 488 new workunits every 15-18 minutes.

~145 credits/task * 2 tasks/WU * 488 WUs / ~18 minutes * 1440 minutes/day = ~11 M credits/day

This is looking good! The project is seeing ~3 M credits/day normally.

xii5ku wrote:

valterc wrote:

For your reference the current pace of the work generator is actually around 488 new workunits every 15-18 minutes.

~145 credits/task * 2 tasks/WU * 488 WUs / ~18 minutes * 1440 minutes/day = ~11 M credits/day

This is looking good! The project is seeing ~3 M credits/day normally.

@valterc, at this point it looks like you meant 488 new tasks, not WUs, per 15-18 minutes.

~150 credits/task * 488 tasks / 15...18 minutes * 1440 minutes/day = ~6...7 M credits/day

This aligns with the total production of the project today and yesterday, as seen on free-dc or boincstats. Unfortunately this means, as a very rough guesstimation, that perhaps 1/2 of the computer capacity which volunteers would like to put to task during this sprint remains without work.

The number of tasks ready to send remain near zero. IOW even though less than a day remains in this sprint, there is still more demand for new work than there is supply.

[H]auntjemima,
until Saturday 18:00 UTC, server status always showed "tasks ready to send" to be zero, or almost zero. During this time, those who updated their clients more frequently than it would update by itself, got enough tasks to keep their hosts busy. Those who let their clients run freely, received almost no tasks.

(Over the course of 12 hours from Saturday 18:00 UTC on, "tasks ready to send" slowly climbed up and are at practically normal level now. This is of course because the sprint ends at Sunday 16:00 UTC, and TN-Grid's quota of 8 tasks in progress per logical CPU gives about a day worth of tasks -- less on quicker hosts, more on slower hosts. Meaning, those who participate in this sprint but will switch elsewhere after the sprint stopped requesting new tasks about a day before the sprint ends.)

My guess that the clients which remained idle make up roughly half of the entire computing capacity that was intended to run TN-Grid this weekend (for the sprint or otherwise) comes from the observation of how many points the various teams have by now, how points were distributed in sprints in which there was no scarcity of work, and from reading at a few forums.

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Edit:
It is a fact that "tasks ready to send" were at or very near zero constantly from Wednesday 16:00 UTC until some time after Saturday 18:00 UTC. (In addition, "tasks in progress" climbed from 35,000 to 65,000 between announcement and start of the sprint, and further to a peak of 79,000 during the sprint. It is now coming down slowly.) So, it is also a fact that demand for new work was higher than supply of new work, constantly from the announcement of the sprint until less than a day before the end of the sprint. IOW, there were hosts without enough work, as a matter of fact.

The only point to disagree on is how many hosts had not enough work; this one point was really just guesswork on my part. But it were certainly many.

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Edit 2:
I disagree on the other hand that bunkering was impossible. The slowness of the work generator does not prevent bunkering. It only prevents some bunkering methods from being effective, while other bunkering methods still work. (Bunkering = receiving new work but not reporting completed work; you can control the latter, only the former depends on the server having work available.)

PS,
message 1362 is not a complaint, merely a correction of what I wrote in message 1356. I understood that WU generation for gene@home is not trivial and cannot be increased by the flip of a switch.

Except during the start of the sprint, it looks like I always had 8 tasks running on my 8 cores. And the 8 current tasks will not be finishe before the deadline.

Before the sprint, I select "No new tasks" for most projects with an exception for WUProp@home and sometimes projects with low CPU demand.

If the sprint project has no GPU application, I'm running in parallel GPU projects with a very low demand or CPU power.

Most of the time, I let the BOINC Manager run freely the task selection of the about 45 really active projects I've selected with different ressources percentages.

Best regards to all crunchers !
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