Development for LHC@home

Today the jobs are running normal.
Using more CPU and an athena.py process up to 99%.

I noticed that the memory size for the created VM is not obeying the setting from the Benchmark_2016_08_05.xml file.
The VM only gets 730 MB

<vbox_job>
<script/>
<os_name>Linux26_64</os_name>
<memory_size_mb>1024</memory_size_mb>
<enable_network/>
<enable_remotedesktop/>
<copy_to_shared>init_data.xml</copy_to_shared>
<completion_trigger_file>shutdown</completion_trigger_file>
<enable_shared_directory/>
<pf_host_port>7859</pf_host_port>
<pf_guest_port>80</pf_guest_port>
<job_duration>1800</job_duration>
<enable_vm_savestate_usage/>
<disable_automatic_checkpoints/>
<heartbeat_filename>heartbeat</heartbeat_filename>
<minimum_heartbeat_interval>1200</minimum_heartbeat_interval>
</vbox_job>

Every VM has now been instrumented to run the DB12 benchmark when it starts. This means that you should see the following two new lines in the task output for the Theory, CMS and LHCb applications.

Guest Log: [INFO] Running the fast benchmark.
Guest Log: [INFO] Machine performance xx.yy HEPSEC06

This makes this Benchmarking application redundant.

... This means that you should see the following two new lines in the task output for the Theory, CMS and LHCb applications.

Guest Log: [INFO] Running the fast benchmark.
Guest Log: [INFO] Machine performance xx.yy HEPSEC06

This makes this Benchmarking application redundant.

I tested this on an i7 2600 with 1 core for the Theory-VM and the other
7 cores 100% busy with SixTrack, Climate and Microbiome Immunity.

2017-09-25 18:51:31 (13896): Guest Log: [INFO] Running the fast benchmark.
2017-09-25 18:53:19 (13896): Guest Log: [INFO] Machine performance 4.82 HEPSEC06

How does this new benchmark affect the computation other than adding a minute or so to the startup time?

It does not affect the computing but helps to understand and optimize the system.

The average performance should be approximately 9.5 HEPSPEC06 per core. Here is a chart comparing some recent HEPSPEC06 measurements to the Dhrystone benchmark values that the BOINC client calculated for the host. Your host was measured to be 12.1 GIOPS so I would expect your HEPSPEC06 value to be higher.

...Your host was measured to be 12.1 GIOPS so I would expect your HEPSPEC06 value to be higher.

When BOINC's benchmark is measured all tasks are suspended, so I repeated a Theory task with 2-4 cores (out of 8) busy and
now the machine performance is 11.64 HEPSEC06.
Quite a difference with previously measured value of 4.82 HEPSEC06 where the Host-CPU had a 100% load.

This suggests something is not optimized when the machine is busy. I now see an advantage of keeping the Benchmarking app as each task is short. You may want to run 4 Benchmarking tasks in parallel and see what the HEPSPEC value is.

I could try that and I'm prepared - all other tasks suspended, no dev-tasks yet on my machine,
but although Benchmark Application 218 Unsent tasks, I don't get 4 workunits.
I get nothing. 5 times:

4954 lhcathome-dev 27 Sep 10:49:35 Scheduler request completed: got 0 new tasks
4955 lhcathome-dev 27 Sep 10:49:35 No tasks sent
4956 lhcathome-dev 27 Sep 10:49:35 No tasks are available for Benchmark Application

I could not get any Benchmark task, so I tested with 4 concurrently running Theory tasks on an else idle system.
Of course it's difficult to run the tests at exactly the same time. The results:

2017-09-27 16:30:48 (13616): Guest Log: [INFO] Running the fast benchmark.
2017-09-27 16:30:56 (14108): Guest Log: [INFO] Running the fast benchmark.
2017-09-27 16:31:02 (13712): Guest Log: [INFO] Running the fast benchmark.
2017-09-27 16:31:23 (17144): Guest Log: [INFO] Running the fast benchmark.

2017-09-27 16:31:47 (13616): Guest Log: [INFO] Machine performance 7.93 HEPSEC06
2017-09-27 16:31:54 (14108): Guest Log: [INFO] Machine performance 8.23 HEPSEC06
2017-09-27 16:32:04 (13712): Guest Log: [INFO] Machine performance 8.18 HEPSEC06
2017-09-27 16:32:27 (17144): Guest Log: [INFO] Machine performance 8.07 HEPSEC06

When running 1 VM the machine performance is 12.33 HEPSEC06