Posts by Tom Donlon

1) Message boards : News : Server Maintenance 6/28/2023 12 PM EDT (4 PM UTC) (Message 76181) Posted 6 Jul 2023 by Tom Donlon Post: Yeah, that all makes sense. Sorry for the anguish everyone.
2) Message boards : News : Server Maintenance 6/28/2023 12 PM EDT (4 PM UTC) (Message 76104) Posted 30 Jun 2023 by Tom Donlon Post: Hey Everyone, I chatted with Prof. Newberg this morning and we have decided not to try to re-validate workunits from the past 3 weeks. When we brought up that we wanted to shut down separation, we asked how long people would need to transition off of the project. Your feedback told us to turn off the project ASAP, so we set a date for shutdown and then even waited a little longer than that before turning off the project. It was easy to turn the validator back on to get people credit for these leftover WUs, but we are worried that we will spend a lot of time chasing a relatively small number of credits for WUs that were returned after the project was known to be ending. If you lost a large amount of credit, or if you have any other issues, please DM me and we will figure out a way to get you the credit that you lost. Again, we are extremely thankful for all the volunteer work that you have done to make this project feasible and successful. Best, Tom
3) Message boards : News : Server Maintenance 6/28/2023 12 PM EDT (4 PM UTC) (Message 76098) Posted 29 Jun 2023 by Tom Donlon Post: As for the jobs that were marked as invalid, I will be meeting with Prof. Newberg tomorrow, and I'll make sure that it's okay that I move all the separation WUs that failed validation from the last 3 weeks back into the queue.
4) Message boards : News : Server Maintenance 6/28/2023 12 PM EDT (4 PM UTC) (Message 76096) Posted 29 Jun 2023 by Tom Donlon Post: The "tasks ready to send" include a bunch of separation wingman jobs that are not being sent out. I will remove those from the system soon. The extra "tasks in progress" are probably Separation tasks that are still floating around on people's machines but haven't been aborted or returned yet.
5) Message boards : News : Server Maintenance 6/28/2023 12 PM EDT (4 PM UTC) (Message 76093) Posted 29 Jun 2023 by Tom Donlon Post: There are also Validation inconclusive tasks with state 3. At least 2 tasks that don't agree, which are right and which are wrong is unknown, a third task probably didn't get sent out to determine right or wrong due to the way you shut Separation down. Edit: Actually it might only be a single task received, second not sent yet or not received back from a host. There are some that have 2 tasks with no 3rd task sent, and some with a 3rd sent but not received back. They made up about 3% of my tasks. Yeah, unfortunately there's not really any good way to handle those. I figured there would be some small fraction of overall tasks that needed additional wingmen tasks to validate. Without running more tasks, there isn't a good way to assign credit to those WUs within the existing architecture (and it's hard to rationalize developing new architecture for a project that has been shut down).
6) Message boards : News : Server Maintenance 6/28/2023 12 PM EDT (4 PM UTC) (Message 76069) Posted 28 Jun 2023 by Tom Donlon Post: Validate errors with 0 credit are state 5 (your first attempt). Tasks that validated but got 0 credit have state 4 (second attempt), the same as those that did get credit (last attempt). They have changed from state 2 (Validation pending). Thanks, that's super helpful!
7) Message boards : News : Server Maintenance 6/28/2023 12 PM EDT (4 PM UTC) (Message 76066) Posted 28 Jun 2023 by Tom Donlon Post: I won't do this today just in case something goes wrong, but I plan on getting around to it tomorrow.
8) Message boards : News : Server Maintenance 6/28/2023 12 PM EDT (4 PM UTC) (Message 76065) Posted 28 Jun 2023 by Tom Donlon Post: Under Invalid tab with units dating back to June 14th. Almost 1200 of them. Maybe I should do 2 or 3 weeks then.
9) Message boards : News : Server Maintenance 6/28/2023 12 PM EDT (4 PM UTC) (Message 76063) Posted 28 Jun 2023 by Tom Donlon Post: When it says they failed, do you mean they are marked with validate state = [2] (invalid)? I might be able to force the server to re-validate everything that was recieved within the last week that has a validate status of 2. But I need to know exactly what you see on your WUs.
10) Message boards : News : Server Maintenance 6/28/2023 12 PM EDT (4 PM UTC) (Message 76059) Posted 28 Jun 2023 by Tom Donlon Post: Sorry about the lost tasks. I don't think there's much I can do about that, unfortunately. At least you're getting credit for the rest!
11) Message boards : News : Server Maintenance 6/28/2023 12 PM EDT (4 PM UTC) (Message 76056) Posted 28 Jun 2023 by Tom Donlon Post: Turned back on with old validator. If this doesn't work then I have no idea how to assign credits for these tasks.
12) Message boards : News : Server Maintenance 6/28/2023 12 PM EDT (4 PM UTC) (Message 76055) Posted 28 Jun 2023 by Tom Donlon Post: Okay, I've turned it off again. I have no idea where the actual credit assignment happens in the validator. I'm just going to turn on the old validator and see if that works.
13) Message boards : News : Server Maintenance 6/28/2023 12 PM EDT (4 PM UTC) (Message 76050) Posted 28 Jun 2023 by Tom Donlon Post: Okay, I've brought things back up with new settings for the validator. Let me know if you see things getting validated with credit now.
14) Message boards : News : Server Maintenance 6/28/2023 12 PM EDT (4 PM UTC) (Message 76048) Posted 28 Jun 2023 by Tom Donlon Post: Noted. I've turned things off again and am working on a fix.
15) Message boards : News : Server Maintenance 6/28/2023 12 PM EDT (4 PM UTC) (Message 76045) Posted 28 Jun 2023 by Tom Donlon Post: Original post only. Thanks! I guess people just don't like getting pinged.
16) Message boards : News : Server Maintenance 6/28/2023 12 PM EDT (4 PM UTC) (Message 76044) Posted 28 Jun 2023 by Tom Donlon Post: I've brought a modified version of the separation validator and assimilator online. These should go through all the existing separation WUs waiting for validation and mark them as valid but ignored (because they aren't actually checked, so they won't go into any system), but it should give out credit as due. I think any wingman tasks should be validated as per normal. I'm going to monitor this and see if it actually starts making a dent in the number of tasks waiting for validation. Hopefully we should see a decrease soon.
17) Message boards : News : Server Maintenance 6/28/2023 12 PM EDT (4 PM UTC) (Message 76041) Posted 28 Jun 2023 by Tom Donlon Post: Just a thought, is it possible to award credits based on the users average credit per work unit they received for previous work? Or if it is the same for all users, award a flat credit to every work unit for everyone? It is very difficult to manually assign credit in BOINCs framework. I am not comfortable manually editing the DB for credit because I don't know where the different BOINC systems pull their information from regarding RAC, gridcoin, etc. and there is no good way to be sure that those systema all update correctly.
18) Message boards : News : Server Maintenance 6/28/2023 12 PM EDT (4 PM UTC) (Message 76040) Posted 28 Jun 2023 by Tom Donlon Post: Also I saw some people talking about notices so I set this thread to not export. Are you all seeing every reply as a notice in the boinc manager? Or just the original post? I'm confused about the concern that we apparently send too many notices.
19) Message boards : News : Server Maintenance 6/28/2023 12 PM EDT (4 PM UTC) (Message 76039) Posted 28 Jun 2023 by Tom Donlon Post: Heads up, it might take some extra time for me to figure out this validator redesign, so the server could be down for a little longer today. I wasn't able to work on this earlier today.
20) Message boards : News : Server Maintenance 6/28/2023 12 PM EDT (4 PM UTC) (Message 76034) Posted 28 Jun 2023 by Tom Donlon Post: In order to give out credit, I will need to rewrite and recompile the validator code. I will take a look at that and see if there is a reasonable way to validate all WUs that are currently in the queue using the validator in a way that will give people credit. If there is not a reasonable way to do that, then unfortunately there is no way to give credit for most of these jobs without also running the WU generator, which will send out more jobs, which defeats the point of shutting down the project. I apologize that many of you feel used because you may not get credit for the work that you've done. I understand that shutting down the WU generator and letting the validator run would have been a somewhat smoother transition, but that would have still left many unvalidated jobs because they could not have had their wingman jobs completed. In the end we opted for fewer wasted cycles on the hardware you're kindly volunteering time on; however, I've heard your complaints and I'll see if there's something I can do about it.

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