I've been running only a single project for a while... Climate Prediction. Two of the tasks on my computer will take at least 40 more days of non stop computing to complete.

I loaded SETI. It immediately downloaded dozens of tasks and started to run them. Fine. But then, I see that the two long running climate tasks are now in a "waiting to run" mode. They will not run until I suspend a bunch of the SETI tasks.

Can someone explain what is going on here and/or how I can ensure these two long running climate tasks continue to run even while SETI cranks away?

TIA.

You don't say which BOINC version you run, or what your cache settings are, but all BOINC versions come with an internal scheduler which tracks how long tasks approximately take based on how quickly your CPU can crunch the numbers and how many tasks there are in cache. As long as you don't fiddle with things, BOINC will learn by itself how long tasks take and switch between them and various projects. Eventually it'll switch back to the CPDN models. You just need to have some patience over it.

---

Version 7.0.28 (x64)

BOINC is running by itself on a leftover Intel I7 1.60 GHz quad core with 2 way interleaving. 4 gigs memory, ATI HD 5650 GPU.

Since there is nothing else on this computer, I've given BOINC 200 gigs of disk, all the memory, and all the CPU and GPU.

BOINC will run 8 tasks simultaneously, but if I Resume a 9th SETI task, it "Waits" the CPDN tasks.

If this is how it works, so be it. It's just that two of the CPDN tasks have a 12/22 and 12/23 deadline, and most certainly will run another 30 days each non-stop.

Thanks for your help.

The goal of BOINC is always to run all work in cache by its deadline.

BOINC will run 8 tasks simultaneously, but if I Resume a 9th SETI task, it "Waits" the CPDN tasks.

This 9th task, does it run on the AMD GPU? For if it does, and you don't want that to happen, you can disable that in the Seti project preferences (Use ATI GPU = no). Using a GPU will always take part of a CPU core, which then either won't be used for doing CPU work, or only partially (depends on BOINC version). There is no GPU application that runs on the GPU only.

The problem here is that BOINC 7.0 will fill the cache for the best piece of hardware first, that's the GPU, then it will fill the cache for the CPU. If you then set the minimum work buffer to a high value as 5 days or more, BOINC will first try to fill the cache for a minimum of 5 days for the GPU, when that's done, do the same for the CPU and then it has to calculate how long all those tasks are going to take, if it can run them all by deadline, and what has priority over something else.

If you've run the CPDN models for some time now, BOINC has a reasonably good idea how long they'll take. It'll just have to juggle that time against the amount of work it got from Seti, whose deadlines are anywhere between a week and a month. Still all the Seti work has a shorter deadline than the CPDN work, and the initial estimates it has on running the Seti work are always a long time off.

So yes, as long as you can keep yourself from interfering, I see that BOINC will be able to run all that work within both the projects their deadline.

---

Thanks for the education. I don't know how to determine if a task is running on the GPU. All I know is that this Intel I7 looks like 8 cores to the OS, and I can run 8 tasks. Introduction of a ninth task, causes another task to go to "Wait".

The SETI tasks are all short... some completing in 1.5 hours or less. The biggest CPDN task has 1053 hours left.

So, I suppose I shall monitor over the next few days and see what happens. I may just have to go exclusively to CPDN models until the ugly ones are wrapped up... just me. Or, to put it another way, I don't yet have any insight into how BOINC prioritizes tasks... your comments regarding BOINC's ability to measure computational speed against due dates are reassuring... and... there are variables that BOINC can't know about... like I am going to shut down the computer for five days.

Cheers.