OWS scheduling and BOINC

[Beyond]

I suspect that this is a BOINC problem but thought I should also post it here..

Using current BOINC v7.2.42, not sure if it's an issue with earlier versions as I just started running OWS.

Running Yoyo (Muon, ECM, Evolution, OGR & OWS) as well as LHC on CPUs
Running GPUGrid on NVidia GPU and Einstein on AMD GPU.
Work cache set to ~.5 days.

BOINC downloads various WUs and seems to schedule more or less appropriately UNTIL OWS WUs are downloaded. Since OWS deadlines are short I would expect them to be scheduled quickly. They aren't. Instead, BOINC schedules and runs various ECM and LHC WUs that have MUCH longer deadlines and waits until the OWS deadlines are too close for comfort then suspends the other WUs to run OWS. This would be OK except that it also suspends the GPU WUs so that more CPU slots are available. Not good.

[Beyond]

A workaround app_config.xml is below, but something in scheduling is not working correctly:

<app_config>
<app>
<name>oddWeiredSearch</name>
<max_concurrent>3</max_concurrent>
</app>
</app_config>

[Beyond]

Also posted this issue on the BOINC forum, here:

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thr ... 2915#52915

[Ananas]

There might be a connection to the short term debits. If Yoyo@home has a high negative value there (limits are +/-86400 = 24*60*60 in my BOINC version), other projects have a higher scheduling priority.

I'm using the command line tool boinccmd to manipulate this value now and then - not sure if the current version still can do that.

Syntax is :

boinccmd --host <yourhostname> --set_debts http://www.rechenkraft.net/yoyo/ 86400 30000

The second value stands for the long term debits, the two values cannot be set separately. The long term debits influences the download priority of a project. Negative values have the effect that other projects are more likely to be used for refilling the cache.

p.s.: I think "localhost" or 127.0.0.1 can be used instead of the hostname, if you run the command on the BOINC host that you want to send the values to.

p.p.s.: The concept of long and short term debits contains a flaw. A project can have positive long term debits and negative short term debits. That means, the host requests new work units for that project with high priority, even though it doesn't plan to run them in the near future. This works the other way round too of course. When long term debits have been introduced, the idea behind it had been to guarantee that the CPU time distribution amongst projects matches exactly the relation between the project shares configured in the project settings. Both values are ballanced so the sum over all projects is zero.

[ChristianB]

The set_debts option is no longer there in newer boinccmd versions.