While looking at Boinctasks, I noticed that boinc was not running on one of my systems. I logged into that wn10x64 system and checked the event viewer and did not see any problem in any of its logs.

I brought up boinc and then checked back with Boinctasks.

GPUGrid was at 0% but I noticed the elapsed time was over 8 hours of which 2 was CPU time. Something seems wrong. Here is a snapshot I just took, about an hour after restarting. This system is a gtx1070 and typically gpugrid finishes after 10 or 11 hours.


Note the 9:21 is elapsed time and the 10:09 is remaining time. There should be only about 2 hours remaining.

I would like to debug this (I am retired with obviously nothing else to do) and started poking around and had a few questions.

1. Who actually does the checkpoint?

Is it the running gpugrid task or does the running task pass this off to boinc to handle? Possibly, boinc died 9 hours previously and gpugrid requested a boatload of checkpoints but its requests were not serviced.

2. If boinc died surely the event viewer would have some record of it. It is very rare that this happens but I have seen it occassionally. I would hate to enable debugging in cc_config to try to catch something very rare and would not know which flag to enable.

3. While poking around, I happened to look at service request and service reply and spotted something strange. I cannot account for this and will post over at boinc to get an answer if no one here knows.

here are 3 lines of the service request xml from gpugrid. Note that grcpool is identified as a project. It is actually a manager.

<global_preferences>
<source_project>https://grcpool.com/</source_project>
<mod_time>0.000000</mod_time>
<battery_charge_min_pct>90.000000</battery_charge_min_pct>

here is the reply from grcpool back to gpugrid with the corresponding pieces from the xml

<source_project>http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/</source_project>
<source_scheduler>https://scheduler.worldcommunitygrid.org/boinc/wcg_cgi/fcgi</source_scheduler>

<mod_time>1503442910</mod_time>
<run_on_batteries>0</run_on_batteries>

Note that grcpool thinks it is replying back to WCG!!!!!

1. Who actually does the checkpoint?

here are 3 lines of the service request xml from gpugrid. Note that grcpool is identified as a project. It is actually a manager.

<global_preferences>
<source_project>https://grcpool.com/</source_project>
<mod_time>0.000000</mod_time>
<battery_charge_min_pct>90.000000</battery_charge_min_pct>

here is the reply from grcpool back to gpugrid with the corresponding pieces from the xml

<source_project>http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/</source_project>
<source_scheduler>https://scheduler.worldcommunitygrid.org/boinc/wcg_cgi/fcgi</source_scheduler>

<mod_time>1503442910</mod_time>
<run_on_batteries>0</run_on_batteries>

Note that grcpool thinks it is replying back to WCG!!!!!

1. Who actually does the checkpoint?

The GPUGrid app does the checkpoint. When you have a very fast GPU, it does its checkpoints so frequently that the (Windows) disk cache never writes the actual data to the drive (this could be resolved by disabling the write caching of the BOINC drive). This behavior results in an error only if the procession of a GPUGrid task is broken unexpectedly (by a power failure, or a system hang)

here are 3 lines of the service request xml from gpugrid. Note that grcpool is identified as a project. It is actually a manager.

<global_preferences>
<source_project>https://grcpool.com/</source_project>
<mod_time>0.000000</mod_time>
<battery_charge_min_pct>90.000000</battery_charge_min_pct>

here is the reply from grcpool back to gpugrid with the corresponding pieces from the xml

<source_project>http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/</source_project>
<source_scheduler>https://scheduler.worldcommunitygrid.org/boinc/wcg_cgi/fcgi</source_scheduler>

<mod_time>1503442910</mod_time>
<run_on_batteries>0</run_on_batteries>

Note that grcpool thinks it is replying back to WCG!!!!!

No, it says that your most recent computing preferences are on WCG.