Hey guys, my computer died today, not sure what's wrong but it's probably either the motherboard, the GPU or a problem with the cooling of the CPU. Either way I don't really have time to look at it this week, and I leave for England this Thursday, so you might want to reassign the three In Progress WUs.
http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/results.php?hostid=8764
I seem to be plagued by these problems lately o-o That's three out of three of the computers in this house breaking down in the past two weeks ...

maybe it is the electricity. try a surge protector> http://www.infosec-ups.com/electrical-protection/product-calatogue.htm

That sounds suspiciously like a power issue. As tahanko says, if you aren't using a surge protector, try one

You ought to be using a UPS, you need to be using at least a surge protector.

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BOINC WIKI

Thanks for the interest and the suggestions, guys, I'll look into getting some surge protection when I get back. On another note, my computer seems to have recovered somewhat (somehow the HDDs' SMART capability was making it balk? WTF?) so I'm letting it finish those WUs.

You ought to be using a UPS

Wow, that's *serious* BOINCing ;)

Random machine/power failures are why I now only crunch short WUs, or marginally longer ones with proper checkpointing.

Had a power failure this weekend. Probably lost an hour of science at worst across 3 hosts. Also revealed a weird characteristic of SIMAP - Sadly cannot prove my conjecture as I'm dry on that project ATM.

Al.

You ought to be using a UPS

Wow, that's *serious* BOINCing ;)

Random machine/power failures are why I now only crunch short WUs, or marginally longer ones with proper checkpointing.

Had a power failure this weekend. Probably lost an hour of science at worst across 3 hosts. Also revealed a weird characteristic of SIMAP - Sadly cannot prove my conjecture as I'm dry on that project ATM.

Al.

Actually, using a UPS on every machine is sound advice. Most operating systems do not write immediately, but delay for a while in the hopes of reducing the number of writes. This includes the directory structure. A sudden loss of power can cause any file that has been recently modified to lose data, including the file system. If data in the file system is lost, entire files can disappear.

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BOINC WIKI

Most operating systems do not write immediately, but delay for a while in the hopes of reducing the number of writes. This includes the directory structure. A sudden loss of power can cause any file that has been recently modified to lose data, including the file system. If data in the file system is lost, entire files can disappear.

This is why it would be nice if everyone used managed writes (is that the term? I forget), but OS APIs tend to be much harder to figure out than they should be. Of course, that doesn't solve the problem that writes also take more time internally than the HDDs would have you think. Aren't UPS' expensive though? I can afford to get some surge protectors (and intend to do so today) but ...

Surge protectors activated (it sounds so sci-fi) :) Now let's hope it helps.