Windows tasks coming up.

Yep, I catched 15 wu,

have a nice day!
Bonsai911

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Pretty sure in my case it was the disk writes slowing things down. Though this was around the time when the temperature in Cambridge set a new UK record. The fan in my laptop is quieter now with 4 cores running than it was then with two! With the IFS I know it was swapping data out to the swap partition from main memory.

Swapping, depending on your paging rate, can kill you.

Most Linux systems can run an app called xosview that will show lots of things going on in your system in essentially real time. It will show how many pages per second are going to and from swap, for example; also the amount of swap actually used. For example: my system has been up 24/7 for 9 days, 12:58; this is not a lot, but it shows it is probably in steady state as it would not be had I just booted it. Boinc comes up automatically when I boot my system. Right now it is running two hadcm3s work units and two hadam4 work units. My system has Swap: 4095996k total, 191512k used, 3904484k free which you might think is quite a lot (though I do not). It would depend on what is out there. I just watched the paging and in the last minute, it paged in 17 pages and paged out none. Pages are 4096 bytes on my system, and my swap is on a 7200rpm SATA hard drive.

My room temperature is 78F; in winter when the heat is on, it is set to 69F. Currently, the hard drive where boinc keep all its files reports:

Oct  3 05:57:52 smartd[11576]: Device: /dev/sdc [SAT], SMART Usage Attribute: 190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel changed from 55 to 54
Oct  3 05:57:52 smartd[11576]: Device: /dev/sdc [SAT], SMART Usage Attribute: 194 Temperature_Celsius changed from 45 to 46

One might say that that is the internal temperature of my machine.

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Oh well missed those too. I now have one task still in progress over 4 machines in intermittent use. There does seem to be a serious problem on the " other side" of this project. As a windows only user the work availability has been poor to say the least - has it been better for linux etc users?. If so why? Is there something in the modelling which is dissuading research teams from producing windows models? Given that we are back to full academic activity across both US and Europe we should be seeing more work forthcoming ( yes I know the bit about postgrads are supposed to work outside of " termtime " I was one once so lets be realistic). I suppose the real question is IF teams are not using boinc cpnd models what are they using? Or, perhaps more radically, has this subject become academically "stale" with little enthusiasm for new entrants to the research field? I.hope it is not the latter.

Is there any indication from the "other side" on work input reduction?

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The windows tasks, batches 840 and 841 are 28 and 16 month Pacific North West 25km resolution tasks so a bit longer than some recently.

[ian wrote:]... Is there something in the modelling which is dissuading research teams from producing windows models? ...

My impression is that it’s mostly a question of new model types. The new OpenIFS application, for example, is a big port — and they want to get that working. Likewise the HADAM4 is new.

The recent HADCMS was Linux-only, which is unusual as that application is not new.

I hope a mix appears again or I’ll have to convert a Windows machine to Linux. We’ll see.

Swapping, depending on your paging rate, can kill you.

When setting up a new machine, I always set:

sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=0

That doesn't eliminate the use of swap entirely, but it discourages it. What you really need for that is a lot of memory.
I always have at least 1 GB per core, or 16 to 64 GB per machine these days. That does the job.

I always have at least 1 GB per core, or 16 to 64 GB per machine these days. That does the job.

Oh! Goody! I have 4 GBytes per core.

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[ian wrote:]... Is there something in the modelling which is dissuading research teams from producing windows models? ...

My impression is that it’s mostly a question of new model types. The new OpenIFS application, for example, is a big port — and they want to get that working. Likewise the HADAM4 is new.

The recent HADCMS was Linux-only, which is unusual as that application is not new.

I hope a mix appears again or I’ll have to convert a Windows machine to Linux. We’ll see.

Has anyone tried the Linux subsystem for Windows?
I know it is only for Windows 10, but it might be the best of both worlds. I have a Ryzen that is my daily driver and really don't want to dual boot. I'm just not sure if Boinc has to be installed through Linux or Windows to take advantage of that. Hmm.
The majority of my fleet is Windows but I'll be converting another to Linux in the coming days.

I've been running Linux as a VMWare guest on my native Windows PCs for awhile now. That is one alternative to converting a whole PC to Linux or dual booting. You may not have as many cores available as you would otherwise, but if that doesn't bother you, it's certainly an option.

In terms of performance, similar to running BOINC in Wine on Linux, I've seen no real degradation in model speed when running in a VM.

I've been running Linux as a VMWare guest on my native Windows PCs for awhile now. That is one alternative to converting a whole PC to Linux or dual booting. You may not have as many cores available as you would otherwise, but if that doesn't bother you, it's certainly an option.

In terms of performance, similar to running BOINC in Wine on Linux, I've seen no real degradation in model speed when running in a VM.

That's actually a good option too, especially since I probably wouldn't want to run full out anyway.
Unbelievably, this Lenovo doesn't have AMD V in the bios. Now time to check for a bios update.
Fortunately everything else does, which should add a productivity boost.

Ian

Andy was taking advantage of the quiet time to upgrade the servers, first on the test site, then the main site.
This wasn't rushed, so that the moderators could check things as he progressed.

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Work from the external researchers is sent to a holding server at Oxford, where the data is checked for problems before being issued.
So there needs to be someone at Oxford who can do that.

***********

Only a guess, but I think that the researchers will know by now about the constant Windows updates at inconvenient times.
And the bugs that sometimes crop up and cause problems.
So using Linux to do their work is reasonable.

The BIG OpenIFS models are Linux too, if and when they show up.

***********

There's only one way to be sure of getting work with this project these days, and that's to NOT have any other projects on the same computer.
Not going to suit everyone, but the researchers don't care who runs the tasks, just as long as they get run. :)

Thanks Les and as if by magic I have 8 new tasks!!!

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Has everyone seen the post in the Linux section about some new Linux work about to be shovelled into the download server?

Has everyone seen the post in the Linux section about some new Linux work about to be shovelled into the download server?

https://www.cpdn.org/forum_thread.php?id=8841#61180

I uave seen the post, but not the work units.

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It'll be a little while longer yet.
The post is just to prepare people for some possible outcomes.

The post is just to prepare people for some possible outcomes.

You are beginning to sound like The Telegraph.

Has everyone seen the post in the Linux section about some new Linux work about to be shovelled into the download server?

I think they broke the shovel and are picking each one out with a pair of tweezers to put them in the hopper.

The last estimate of the time for doing these by hand was another two days from now but that was a week ago so things may have changed.