Yeah I was just thinking I mean, isn't it a bit silly that I had a SETI@home project sitting there and even though it had a grand total of about 270 hours to completion or something and I do have my PC on a LOT generally speaking (sometimes I leave it on all night often by accident and am often using it for large amounts of time in a day)... it still was overdue and had to be aborted?

I mean, just how much wasted computer power is that? o.O

Apparently it was as much as 17.3 days overdue!! But like, I'm only a normal computer-user, I don't have some super-computer and I don't have it on all of the time. Why not just have smaller projects that people might actually manage to churn through?

I have actually closed BOINC for now and am using another distributed computing project, because quite a few tasks seemed similar in size and I just don't think I'll ever get to the point of submitting any..

Surely all that will happen is I'll push my CPU to the limit and reduce it's lifetime... for nothing?

Am I missing something here? lol

Thanks for reading! :)

Mike, UK!

Why didn't you ask at the SETI forum for help?

They would have told you that you got an AstroPulse task, which is the longer type of work units at SETI. You can disable those in your preferences so that you only get the shorter ones.

Additionally, SETI is not the only project that uses BOINC. There are over 70 different ones, some with longer tasks, some with shorter. Look here for some of them.

Gruß,
Gundolf

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Computer sind nicht alles im Leben. (Kleiner Scherz)

oh sorry about that, I think the reason I asked here is even though THIS issue was with SETI@home, it seemed to apply to other projects too.

Is there a way to reject all projects that take more than a certain time for completion? I think that should be a more obvious option when BOINC is first set-up, because I mean most people that sit at computers, even heavy users, would struggle to meet some of the deadlines for the large workloads (and maybe some of the smaller ones I don't know)..

Do you think an option could be considered to select what kind of computer user you are on BOINC's first initialization? Like from light use to heavy use, or just some general way to work out what kind of work would be suitable for your pc by default?

It would just be nice to see projects like BOINC more accessible to the general public :)

Maybe I'll have a look for that option... I just don't want to see hundreds of hours of working my CPU really hard going to waste!

You can only automate things so far. After that, people have to do their own thinking.
And reading the project web site before attaching, to see what the project is about, would help to decide if one's computer is capable of running it.

Two other things:
BOINC isn't a project; it's just a framework for running projects, all of which are separate entities. It's up to users to choose which one's to attach to.

BOINC uses spare cpu clock cycles to run the attached projects.
If a computer is only on for part of a day, and heavily used while it is, then BOINC won't have much time to run the project work units, which means that they'll run out of time before their deadline.

BOINC uses spare cpu clock cycles to run the attached projects.
If a computer is only on for part of a day, and heavily used while it is, then BOINC won't have much time to run the project work units, which means that they'll run out of time before their deadline.

But it will learn from that experience and not download as much work the next time, or not even try to download the Seti Astropulse task as it knows it won't be able to do it in time.

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oh that's really clever! Yeah that kind of thing is brilliant, because of course I still want to be PART of the SETI@home project for example, but I can't handle the big jobs like that.

That's cool that it learns from it, I'll give it another go later :)