Development for LHC@home

I have many many of the herwig7's and pythia's over 2 days and even over 4 days
My longest herwig7 was Run time 22 days 3 hours

The powheg-box are usually the only ones that average 7 hours

In reply to boboviz's message of 19 Jun 2026:

I have 2 wus running for 3 days.
VERY long runners :-P

Now 5 days and 12hrs
But i'm near to deadline.... :-(

Laufzeit 3 Tage 2 Stunden 57 min. 17 sek.
CPU Zeit 2 Tage 23 Stunden 40 min. 20 sek.
Priority 0
Prüfungsstatus Gültig
Punkte 4,648.39

finished this Morning.

In reply to boboviz's message of 22 Jun 2026:

In reply to boboviz's message of 19 Jun 2026:

I have 2 wus running for 3 days.
VERY long runners :-P

Now 5 days and 12hrs
But i'm near to deadline.... :-(

No need to get nervous.

I have a running task with walltime (so far) >8 days:

===> [runRivet] Mon Jun 15 01:48:38 UTC 2026 [boinc pp z1j 13000 45 - herwig7 7.2.0 nlo-pw-dipole 100000 974]
...
91900 events processed

... and running fine.

Looking at long walltimes only(!) does not indicate a task got stuck.

Last info from the mcplots team:
They do not have a timeout that rejects any result.

BOINC also does not reject tasks that started before the deadline.


Most important:
It is possible to pause/resume Theory docker tasks but each full restart - e.g. due to a reboot - will cause the tasks to start from scratch.

In reply to computezrmle's message of 23 Jun 2026:

Last info from the mcplots team: They do not have a timeout that rejects any result.
BOINC also does not reject tasks that started before the deadline.

So, what is the sense of the deadline?

Most important:
It is possible to pause/resume Theory docker tasks but each full restart - e.g. due to a reboot - will cause the tasks to start from scratch.

:-(
I turn off my pcs often and it's not a realy chechpoint...

In reply to boboviz's message of 23 Jun 2026:

In reply to computezrmle's message of 23 Jun 2026:

Last info from the mcplots team: They do not have a timeout that rejects any result.
BOINC also does not reject tasks that started before the deadline.

So, what is the sense of the deadline?

Most important:
It is possible to pause/resume Theory docker tasks but each full restart - e.g. due to a reboot - will cause the tasks to start from scratch.

:-(
I turn off my pcs often and it's not a realy chechpoint...

One reason (for BOINC) is to avoid huge local work buffers that can't be processed before the deadline.
So, after the deadline BOINC returns unstarted tasks as errors.

The vbox app uses snapshots, this doesn't work for the docker app.
See:
https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/blob/master/samples/docker_wrapper/checkpoint_notes

In reply to computezrmle's message of 23 Jun 2026:

One reason (for BOINC) is to avoid huge local work buffers that can't be processed before the deadline.
So, after the deadline BOINC returns unstarted tasks as errors.

I'm not speaking about not-started-wus. I'm speaking about wus that arrive at deadline without completion.
What's the sense of checkpoint (for reboot, turn off of the pc, etc) if it restarted calculation from scratch?

The vbox app uses snapshots, this doesn't work for the docker app.
See:
https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/blob/master/samples/docker_wrapper/checkpoint_notes

Uh, i didn't see that point, thank you!!
I hope that, before or later, docker/podman will be more friendly about checkpoint/restart

Computer ID 4639
Laufzeit 6 Tage 5 Stunden 2 min. 52 sek.
CPU Zeit 5 Tage 22 Stunden 16 min. 55 sek.
Endstatus 0 (0x00000000)

3790564 5495 20 Jun 2026, 14:16:24 UTC 21 Jun 2026, 20:35:01 UTC Abgebrochen 103,871.66 101,751.50 --- Theory Simulation v7.68 (docker)
windows_x86_64
3791330 5406 21 Jun 2026, 20:38:06 UTC 24 Jun 2026, 12:08:36 UTC Abgebrochen 180,786.57 180,107.30 --- Theory Simulation v7.68 (docker)
x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
3792513 4639 24 Jun 2026, 14:49:01 UTC 30 Jun 2026, 19:52:29 UTC Fertig und Bestätigt 536,572.88 512,215.00 9,243.35 Theory Simulation v7.68 (docker)
windows_x86_64

Nice 6 day Valid Axel
Run time 6 days 5 hours 2 min 52 sec
CPU time 5 days 22 hours 16 min 55 sec
Priority 0
Validate state Valid - herwig7
Credit 9,243.35

It‘s your 1.001th Message in -dev. Thank you to watch it.

https://lhcathomedev.cern.ch/lhcathome-dev/result.php?resultid=3810113
This is my first long running WU
Run time 2 days 4 hours 55 min 41 sec
CPU time 2 days 1 hours 31 min 34 sec
Priority 0
Validate state Valid
Credit 4,199.21

Anwendung Theory Simulation 7.69 (docker)
Name Theory_2922-4777184-1262_1787080866
Status Aktiv
erhalten 18.08.2026 21:37:33
Ablaufdatum 28.08.2026 21:37:30
Geschätzter Berechnungsaufwand 3.600 GFLOPs
Prozessorzeit 6d 08:15:50
Prozessor-Zeit seit dem letzten Checkpoint ---
bisherige Laufzeit 6d 16:49:47
Geschätzte verbleibende Zeit ---
Fortschritt 100,000%
benötigter Arbeitsspeicher 2,16 MB
Größe des Arbeitspakets 95,37 MB
Verzeichnis slots/4
Prozess-Nr. 2012
Fortschrittsrate 0,720% pro Stunde
Ausführbare Datei docker_wrapper_22b_windows_x86_64.exe
Application Name Theory
Plan Class docker

You can see this application has been running for over 6 days now. According to the website (https://lhcathomedev.cern.ch/lhcathome-dev/results.php?userid=264&offset=0&show_names=0&state=6&appid=), the task has been aborted. What happens to this task after more than 500,000 seconds of processing time? Will it still be counted or not? I'll let it run to see when it finishes. Isn't it important to the operator to receive completely finished tasks? Why is the time limit for completing tasks so short when they know there are tasks that take considerably longer?