It may seem a little eccentric, but I like to watch the progress of all the various projects I participate in on the graph in the statistics tab -- and I like to keep the credits of same fairly close together. I find that some projects give grossly larger returns than others, with the result that they quickly dwarf the others, many of which I have been crunching for years.

I can, of course just constantly adjust the project priorities, but this is neither an exact science nor a quick solution. Sometimes a project needs to be watched for a month or more to be certain that any of its behavior has actually changed. By the time a satisfactory resource share has been found, many other projects may have started to need to play catch-up -- which means yet more tweaking of the resource shares.

Since I am apparently in the minuscule minority that considers cross-project parity desirable, I am not requesting that. Instead, I'd like to propose an option to change how the scheduler works: instead of calculating debt and WU priority only in terms of 'minutes of calculating time', allow the user to instruct the client to use 'Total credit' or 'Recent Average Credit' (in proportion to resource share, of course) instead. Keep all the other behaviors as is (switch between tasks every xx minutes, etc).

Folks who do not desire this can use the default 'by minutes' behavior which now ships with the client. Folks like me, on the other hand, can choose to keep all the high-share projects at a similar total-credit, and lower-share projects at another, lower total-credit.

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Hi All, here are a couple of features that I would definitely find useful.
I have only been using Boinc for 4 months so sorry if these items have been suggested in the past.

I only have my home PC on in the evenings which averages out at 5.25 hours a day, but I often getting work units down loaded that I am not likely to complete within the deadline. I know you can abort work units but I don’t have the manager open all the time, so I often find some that have been processed for 3 – 8 hours before I spot that I am not going to complete the other 54 hours before the dead line.
I wish: There was a setting that you could set your expected average compute hours per day, and that Boinc would not download / or auto abort work items that are not going to be completed before the deadline. (Auto abort may be easier to implement)
If Boinc already dose this or similar automaticity based on processing time in the last week etc, it doesn’t seem to be making a very good job of it and could we have a manual override for the hours per day value.

I have access to a Server 2008 R2 system that is running Hyper-V during the day, but there is not much activity during the evening. At the moment Bonic uses the system CPU usage to detect when it should suspend processing, but on a Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V system this value does not include CPU usage of any virtual PCs that are running just the parent OS ‘Server 2008 R2’. The true system wide CPU usage is shown on one of the Perfmon performance counters for Hyper-v, I forget which one.
I wish: Can Boinc auto detect or a manual check box be provided to allow it to monitor the Perfmon performance counter instead of the normal system CPU usage.

Something ells that would be good but less important for me at the moment is to have two sets of the ‘Day-of-week override’ values each set having its own ‘use at most CPU time’ value. I would like to have been able to set some of my systems to 100% CPU for 17:30 – 07:30, and then a trickle processing of 10-30% from 07:30 – 17:30 to make sour that it doesn’t interfere with normal operations. This may also get around the problem with Server 2008 R2 system that is running Hyper-V I mentioned above.

Thanks for listening.

I'd like to propose an option to change how the scheduler works: instead of calculating debt and WU priority only in terms of 'minutes of calculating time', allow the user to instruct the client to use 'Total credit' or 'Recent Average Credit' (in proportion to resource share, of course) instead.

It is already being worked on, see e.g. the paragraph "credit-driven scheduling" on page [trac]wiki:ClientSchedOctTen[/trac].

Peter

I only have my home PC on in the evenings which averages out at 5.25 hours a day, but I often getting work units down loaded that I am not likely to complete within the deadline. I know you can abort work units but I don’t have the manager open all the time, so I often find some that have been processed for 3 – 8 hours before I spot that I am not going to complete the other 54 hours before the dead line.
I wish: There was a setting that you could set your expected average compute hours per day, and that Boinc would not download / or auto abort work items that are not going to be completed before the deadline. (Auto abort may be easier to implement)
If Boinc already dose this or similar automaticity based on processing time in the last week etc, it doesn’t seem to be making a very good job of it and could we have a manual override for the hours per day value.

BOINC indeed does this (or at least tries to, at its best :-) automatically, and AFAIK the devs would like it to maybe refine, but keep this way, without any manual override controls.

Just tasks already past the deadline are auto-aborted, tasks which might not meed deadlines should not be downloaded at all - possibly the server should not have sent such task, but did.

Peter

Hi, Another feature requests.
On the task list of the Boinc manager can we have multi column sorting. I normally have the tasks sorted by ‘To completion’ time, but I would also like to be able to sort by report dead line as well.
If 3 column sorting is possible that would be even better.

Hi
Just remembered the other thing I was going to subject.
A number of times I have noticed that when I have got a mix of tasks I get the following situation. Tasks with a long (+80 hours) time to complete and with a deadline 40-60 days away are running as high priority. And at the same time tasks with a short (0-3 hours) time to complete remaining and with a deadline 0-32 hours away but these are running normally or not running at all.
I know that Boinc is running the long tasks at high priority otherwise they will never get completed before the deadline, but with my PC just running on average 5 hours a day, without my intervention it is unlikely that the short task would get finished before its dead line.
Can I suggest that in addition to the current scheduling, that when a task gets within 24 hours of its dead line the scheduler’s priority switches to completing as many tasks as possible, starting with the smallest time to complete first. Also no new tasks are started while there are still tasks within this 24 hour window, overriding the switch between applications function.
This may result in tasks exceeding their dead line without having been started, but that is better than having a number of tasks that exceeding their dead line but only had 0-3 hours left to run.

I have suggested a 24 hour window because I am well aware that Boinc doesn’t know when the PC will be processing again, so that the scheduler needs to have time to switch priorities and get the task completed. A similar thing could be done for tasks that have (4-12 hours) time to complete remaining, but a window of 48 hours.


Something that would be difficult to implement at the moment but is worth considering in the future as GPU processing becomes more main stream, is the ability to allocate project resources for GPU separately from CPU.


The other minor request was to have a different row background colour for tasks that are currently running. With a 8 core CPU + GPU task switching and a buffering of tasks waiting to start you end up with quite a page full, even with the ‘Show active tasks’ filter on its not immediately noticeable which ones are running.

Trevor

Now also available in the BOINC FAQs: A list of past requests and what answer the developers gave them.

On the stats charts for both total & average credits for the host / user it would be really good to have a second Y axis showing the ‘run time’ used each day to generate the recorded credits for each project on the chart. (Perhaps this could be displayed using a dashed line of the same colour as the project’s credit results)
I have a number of PC running Boinc for different amounts of time each day (5 hours, 16 hours, 24 hours) and although I can compare credits generated, I can’t easily work out the effort required to generate the credits.
I want to be able to easily say that leaving on my new PC ‘A’ (2.5GHz 8 Core CPU + 1 GPU) for another 45 minutes each day is equivalent 3 hours of my older PC ‘B’ (3GHz 2 Core CPU).

This may seem a little controversial because it encourages using Boinc as a race for high credit scores, which I do enjoy although 100K per day is still out of my league.
This will assist the core Boinc supporters to contribute to their chosen projects, but doing so in the most efficient way possible whilst keeping their electricity bills down to a minimum.
In my example above PC ’A’ probably only draws 25%-40% more power than PC ‘B’, but if I use PC ‘A’ more or instead of PC ‘B’ to generate the same amount of credits it costs me less in electricity.

Using the same data it would be good to be able to compare Hosts on the website stats by their generated credits divided by the ‘run time’ used to generate it.

Thanks for the reply, and for pointing out the link!

I'm using the 6:12:14 version on the laptop of my wife and I have to say,
beyond an unexpected stability and faster opening of several windows, I do not find much there.
Why put first the "news"? I would put it toward the back, before the "Disk"
But above all, why take away the voice "events"? Now we look for in a submenu,
which was quite annoying for those who want to know what's going on.
Even have reversed the fields on the screen "Elaboration/Elaborazioni" I do not find linear (rather than allow themselves to free fields, so that you can customize the order of the same).

I'm using the 6:12:14 version

This is still an Alpha version, not a production/recommended version.
And as such, from the BOINC Alpha thread:

Q. Why was the Messages tab removed and is it now hidden as an Event Log in the Advanced menu?

A. Basically our findings suggested it was stressing new people out, making them think something was wrong when it wasn't. For instance, quota exceeded on fast machines, or temporary errors that caused a backoff. A lot of the time just letting the client do its thing would eventually clear out the issue and continue processing. Messages are really only needed to diagnose problems.

We have added a new way of conveying info to users, which we call Notices.

Notices are intended for average, non-technical users. They are used for

a) situations that require the user's attention; e.g. BOINC can't do work because its disk quota is exhausted. Notices of this sort should be prescriptive; that is, they should tell the user what to do, in non-tech language.

b) events that are likely to be of interest to the user; e.g., a science news item from an attached project, a credit milestone, a post in a subscribed thread, a friend request, etc.

The goal of the Notices mechanism is to keep users informed, involved, and interested, even if they don't regularly visit project web sites or open the Manager.

Some aspects of Notices:

1) Notices are HTML; they can include pictures, hyperlinks, etc.
2) New notices are announced to users even if the BOINC manager is hidden.
On Windows there's a popup in the system tray; on Mac the icon bounces.
3) The stream of notices includes project-supplied RSS feeds, as well as messages generated by the BOINC client and project schedulers.

The Notices tab replaces the old Messages tab.

The contents of the Messages tab are now available in a separate "Event Log" window, which can be opened via the Advanced menu.

The Notices system is under development.

Please let us know if there are specific things that should or should not be displayed as Notices.

Eventually we'll have some web interfaces for controlling what project events are shown as Notices.

Now, neither of what you ask for is really a wish, so it's not really in its place in the Wishlist (lista dei desideri) thread. But I'll leave it here for now. Next time, just make your own thread.

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Now, neither of what you ask for is really a wish, so it's not really in its place in the Wishlist (lista dei desideri) thread. But I'll leave it here for now. Next time, just make your own thread.

Thanks a lot for you patience.
Thanks, also, for you answers :-)