I have a BURP task suspended, because I think it's defective, and I'm waiting for the admin to confirm if I should abort.

So now BOINC is idle, because when it asks for more tasks, it returns with:

Not requesting tasks: some task is suspended via Manager

Since when does a suspended task prevent getting new tasks? Is this something new? Surely this is not intentional by the developers....

This is with 7.0.62.

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Reno, NV
Team: SETI.USA

It's intentional. "If the user has suspended a result for a project, don't fetch more work from it" -- 25 Nov 2006

I don't know what's the reason behind it, though. There's this, but I'm not sure if it's talking about the same thing:

John McLeod wrote:

We tried getting work with projects suspended and there were deadline problems. Users complained that work was reported late because we allowed work to be fetched in this situation. So, to avoid late work, and some of the complaints, we do not fetch work in this situation - even if a CPU is idle. (boinc_alpha, 3 Nov 2008)

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Ugh.

That may be an okay thing when attached to multiple projects. Other projects can still send tasks.

But for MT projects like BURP/renderfarm/yafu/milkyway/SimOne/etc, it really does not work to be attached to multiple projects. You end up with many idle threads while BOINC winds down all the single thread tasks, when it is time to switch to a MT task. This is especially a problem when some of the single thread tasks are the kind that do not checkpoint, so the continue to run to completions (as they should). So if you are running, say, BURP and RNA, you can end up in a situation where a single RNA task will run for a month, while the other 7 threads sit idle because a MT task is up next.

That is a long way to say when running MT applications, they really need to be run without running other projects as back-ups. An in that case, if you suspend a task, you should be able to get more work from that same project.

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Reno, NV
Team: SETI.USA