I like the BOINC idea although some of its quirks have given me problems earlier. Therefore I try to keep an eye on it now and then and report any oddities.

For a while the scheduling has behaved in what seems like an odd manner to me and I think it is due to the expected remaining time and/or the progress % for climatepredicition.net not being saved when the computer shuts down. This results in large fluctuations in the queue length in the following manner:

1) I turn on the computer in the morning and cp.net is at 0%, 750h expected before completion. BOINC decides the computer is overcommitted (this happens even if it has a week to finish only 4-5 hours of computation work in the form of smaller WUs in addition to the cp.net WU it is running, which has 8 months remaining to finish and is in no danger of not doing so).

2) BOINC finishes small WUs on an earliest-deadline-first basis until only the cp.net WU remains.

3) It then resumes the cp.net WU, which retrieves its position (currently about 70%), suddenly subtracting about 400h of CPU time from the queue. This results in it resuming round robin mode and downloading more small workunits to be ready to switch and continuing in this mode until I switch off the computer.

4) GOTO 1)


In other words, BOINC spends about half it\'s time or more in earliest-deadline-first mode, which is probably not quite fair to your project. Seemingly because the progress/estimated remaining time isn\'t retrieved upon startup, only when the cp.net WU is actually resumed.

I run BOINC 5.5.2 and hadsm3 v4.13 under Windows 2000.

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The latest recomended version of BOINC is 5.2.13, my personal recomendation is to run 5.2.8 or later.

I saw this problem, and more serious related ones, fairly frequently in the 4.xx clients. They have been reduced in the current client.

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BOINC WIKI

BOINCing since 2002/12/8

That fixes it, thank you. I didn\'t expect it to be BOINC related, as it only seemed to be CP.net that didn\'t recall it\'s progress upon startup.

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And now it is back, unfortunately, with BOINC 5.2.13 and hadsm3 4.13..

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I had a similar problem with one system the other day. I traced it to a problem with the result\'s deadline in client_state.xml

Somebody had set the clock back 10 years on the system and then back to what it should have been. The result\'s deadline was reset to over 100 years in the past, exactly as described in this thread. I never thought I\'d have to apply my own fix!

A bug report is heading towards the BOINC development mailing list.

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"The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer