I have a GTX550Ti and according to skgiven this is better for cuda 4.2 than cuda 3.1 tasks. I can confirm that as a cuda 3.1 WU takes 41xxx seconds to complete.
So I have set to accept beta and cuda 4.2 short runs for this card, but however there is plenty of work according to the server page, I don't get any and there is another cruncher who gets no taks either.

How can this be solved?
Thanks.

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Greetings from TJ

This machine with 550Ti and driver 306.97 can do cuda 4.2 as it did 2 beta's today that finished good and a third beta is in process.
So why not getting cuda 4.2 short runs?

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Greetings from TJ

If you're not getting the short 4.2 it's because there isn't any, the server status page is inaccurate.

Edit: I see you were told this already in another thread.

If you're not getting the short 4.2 it's because there isn't any, the server status page is inaccurate.

I don't belief this unless I hear it from a project member like Nathan of GDF.
Looking at the server status page several times a day, I see all numbers changing, so it is updating. And moreover Nathan mentioned that they had a whole lot new WU's.

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Greetings from TJ

If you're not getting the short 4.2 it's because there isn't any, the server status page is inaccurate.

I don't belief this unless I hear it from a project member like Nathan of GDF.
Looking at the server status page several times a day, I see all numbers changing, so it is updating. And moreover Nathan mentioned that they had a whole lot new WU's.

There must be something wrong with the short queue, then. Because I also don't get tasks from it and that's why I've enabled the long queue for now, which seems to work well.

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Team Belgium

I have updated to the latest nVidia driver 314.07, cuda version 5000 for the GTX550Ti.
And guess what happened, I got a: Short runs (2-3 hour on fastest card) 6.52 (cuda42)

So it seems a driver issue after all then...?

I will see how long it takes to complete, estimated 12:32 hours. It is now finishing Einstein@home (they take 35 minutes while BOINC continuously estimate 1hour and 50 minutes).

@microchip, if you can check which driver you are using on the pc that is not getting cuda42 tasks, and is the same as I had before (306.97) then we are pretty sure it's a driver thing. Thanks for your help.
Your statement that you didn't got these tasks either, convinced me to update my drivers.

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Greetings from TJ

I have updated to the latest nVidia driver 314.07, cuda version 5000 for the GTX550Ti.
And guess what happened, I got a: Short runs (2-3 hour on fastest card) 6.52 (cuda42)

So it seems a driver issue after all then...?

I will see how long it takes to complete, estimated 12:32 hours. It is now finishing Einstein@home (they take 35 minutes while BOINC continuously estimate 1hour and 50 minutes).

@microchip, if you can check which driver you are using on the pc that is not getting cuda42 tasks, and is the same as I had before (306.97) then we are pretty sure it's a driver thing. Thanks for your help.
Your statement that you didn't got these tasks either, convinced me to update my drivers.

I also get one in a while, but it's not consistent. I mean I should get a new task before the current one finishes crunching, or sometimes just after it finishes. That's not the case here... Even after hitting the "Update" button once in an hour, it still reports no tasks available for short queue 4.2

If it was a driver issue, I wouldn't get any tasks at all. Also, the long queue works just fine here. It's just the short one that's causing problems so more things point to server side issue

PS: I'm using driver 310.19 on Linux

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Team Belgium

Guys....

If there are tasks in the queue the server will send you one. The server does not know which driver you have installed and it doesn't care which driver you have installed.

The reason you do not get tasks when the server status page says there are tasks is because the server status page lies. If you think that when you click the Server Status link that the server then goes and counts all the tasks in the queue and puts the number in the Status Page you see then you are wrong. It does not happen that way. I will explain what happens...

The server counts the tasks in the queues about every 10 minutes then it saves those totals in memory. You come along five minutes later and click the Server Status link and it gives you the numbers it saved from the previous count which happened 5 minutes earlier. Now here is the very, very tricky part so read very, very carefully and think very, very hard, OK? In between the time it counts the tasks in the queues and the time you look at the Server Status other hosts sometimes request work and grab all the tasks. If you understand that then you can understand how you can be looking at the Server Status page and it's telling you 359 tasks (for example) are available but then you click Update in BOINC manager and the Event Log says "no work available". The numbers on the Server Status page are never current which means they are not up to date, they are old info. The report of "no work available" in the Event Log is based on current info therefore you should trust it rather than the Server Status page.

OK, there you have all the information you need to understand this riddle that confuses you. If you still do not understand then you need to start again at the top of my post and read it, repeatedly if necessary, until you understand because that is exactly the way it happens. And if you think I am mistaken then note that there are least 40 other regular readers/posters here who would correct me if I am wrong on this matter and you will note that none of them do.

Yah, Nathan said he put 1,000 tasks in the queue but stop and think.... maybe there are 5,000 hosts that are requesting work from that queue so they gobble it all up within a few minutes?

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BOINC <<--- credit whores, pedants, alien hunters

The server does not know which driver you have installed and it doesn't care which driver you have installed.

This is not true. I have had many occasions for several projects for AMD as well as nVidia cards that BOINC tells that I need to update my drivers to get work. And indeed after an update I got work then.

Indeed a lot of crunchers think that server pages from all projects lies. And indeed I understand how it works. You can also see how many crunchers are active, how many computers and how many Gigaflops, and do the calculation. Or there are many many more computers and crunchers and perhaps even teraflops, the pages are lying did you know.

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Greetings from TJ

The server does not know which driver you have installed and it doesn't care which driver you have installed.

This is not true. I have had many occasions for several projects for AMD as well as nVidia cards that BOINC tells that I need to update my drivers to get work. And indeed after an update I got work then.

OK, I might be wrong about the driver but what I said about the number of tasks in the queue is correct. And if you will think about how the server can say there are (for example) 1000 tasks in the queue and then your host requests work and the server says "no tasks available" well then you see the server does lie. First it says there are tasks, the next second it says there are none. Obviously it cannot be that there are tasks and that there are not tasks simultaneously so obviously the server lies.

If you look near the upper left corner of the Server Status page it gives the server software version number and a time. That is the time the queue totals were last counted. Notice that the time almost never matches the time you clicked the Server Status link.

If what I am saying is not true then what is your explanation for why the server says there are tasks but you cannot get one?

Also, why does it say in your log "no tasks available" instead of "update your driver"?

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BOINC <<--- credit whores, pedants, alien hunters

And if you think I am mistaken then note that there are least 40 other regular readers/posters here who would correct me if I am wrong on this matter and you will note that none of them do.

OK, I'm one of them. I haven't up until now, because most of your mis-statements are tiresome rather than fundamentally wrong, but since you've started claiming detailed knowledge, we'd better start picking a few apart.

Driver versions: BOINC servers most certainly do both know and care about driver versions. The easiest project to see this on is Einstein, where the server logs are just a click away, and you can read many messages like 117518.

Server status page: the time in the top left corner is the time the page content was rendered into HTML on the server. If you refresh the page (F5 in my browser), it changes. [Edit: at this project - other projects vary]

However, it is correct that the task counts are collected periodically by a background daemon and stored, and the displayed statistics are taken from the most recent daemon run. I have no idea whether this project has configured the daemon run interval to be 10 minutes - it seems plausible. But to categorise that slight lag in updating as 'lying' is way too far over the top. Tasks on this project run for several hours: to suggest that every single active computer on the project (your 5,000 figure) has collected new work in the last ten minutes, when currently only about 25% of users have been active in the last 24 hours, is absurd - and removes all credibility from the points you are trying to make.

Thank you, Richard, for correcting some of the details I've got wrong. You seem to think that makes me entirely wrong so do explain why TJ sees tasks in the queue on the Server Status page but cannot get a task.

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BOINC <<--- credit whores, pedants, alien hunters

I agree with Dagorath, please do tell, you seem to be more informed than either of us and I'm sure there has to be a reason other than just drivers.

I lost during the reinstall nvidia driver, 3 long tasks of course im lost rac for them..sad..
Within last three days I had lost about 50,000 rac in users rankings.Why??? if im turn off my computer im dont lose soo many,exemple.. But I Crunching 24/7 without any errors on my part, but i see some fail jobs in my results.
Now two days i cannot get over 577000..just im circled around..
But i see , many people have same problem..so what happened?
sorry for engl.

Jozef J

Stop doing the short runs and just do the long runs, you're RAC will jump up a bunch. With 2 GTX680's they should take about 5 1/2 hours a wu (the new toni's). I leave the short runs to the less powerful cards.

Thank you, Richard, for correcting some of the details I've got wrong. You seem to think that makes me entirely wrong so do explain why TJ sees tasks in the queue on the Server Status page but cannot get a task.

Because they are not there - some WU's were removed manually because they were failing/causing problems, as announced here. Presumably when WU's are added to the queue the queue count gets told that 5000 (or whatever the number is) have been added. While it can deal with WU addition, begin sent, server aborted... the Ready To Send Queue is not designed to deal with WU's being manually removed by the researchers, so it probably became inaccurate. Perhaps they would have been better moving them to the Result Deletion Queue, rather than manually deleting them?

Anyway, at least one queue is likely to be removed and this isn't the normal situation. Testing appears to still be underway with several app versions being used over the different queues. The queues will probably be corrected after the testing or experiment seeding is over.
Normally the server status page is accurate to within a few tasks (<10).

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FAQ's

HOW TO:
- Opt out of Beta Tests
- Ask for Help

Not there, uh huh. Well, I apologize if this ruffles feathers but where I come from if it says tasks are there when they're not there then it's lying. Some say it's telling "porkies" and that's fine, you know whatever slang works for you, here we call it lying. Not suggesting somebody should be taken out and whipped over it, not saying all operations must cease until it's fixed, just saying it's not truthing i.e. it's lying. If this same situation should occur again in the future and nobody is providing the detailed explanation and guys are needlessly flailing around with driver upgrades... would it be OK if I say something like "the server is not truthing again"? Would that be less offensive?

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BOINC <<--- credit whores, pedants, alien hunters

To me lying is intentionally trying to deceive. I'd say in this case it's simply a mistake, an error with no intention of deception. BOINC client/server has many problems, some far far worse than this. I doubt many of them are intentional.

TJ, are you getting tasks consistently now, or as erroneous as before the driver update? The driver version really shouldn't cause such behaviour (unless the BOINC log said "driver version xxx too low, please upgrade to at least xxx").

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

Only as info: Very soon we run out of long queue Work ;)

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DSKAG Austria Research Team: http://www.research.dskag.at