High disk usage for Einstein compared to Seti
15 Jan 2008 22:02:04 UTC
Topic 193443
(moderation:
When checking the disk usage Einstein says 126.59mb, SETI only uses 6.56mb. Is there data that should have been sent back and failed? Will it ever get sent back? This has been like this for about 1 week.
Dale
High disk usage for Einstein compared to Seti
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Nothing to worry about. Both SETI and Einstein are similar in sending a large amount of data from the project to your computer: your job - it's a classic needle and haystack problem - is to sift through the haystack they've sent you, and just return the needle.
There are differences. SETI just send you a very small haystack - just a haybale, really - and discards it once you've finished looking through it. Einstein sends you a whole lot of haystacks at once, but then asks you to look through it lots of different ways (long needles, short needles, bent needles, straight needles - sorry, the analogy starts to break down here, can anyone help?). Anyway, you get the idea - you've downloaded more data from Einstein, but then you spend more time looking through it. Einstein does delete the data files eventually, but usually a few at a time - you probably won't see the total 'disk usage' go down much.
RE: When checking the disk
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In addition to what Richard said, if your system is relatively active, the way Einstein sends data to your computer(s) means that it doesn't have to download a new set of files every time you get a new task assigned. You could potentially run for a week or more without downloading additional files. When all tasks from the dataset that you have on your system have been processed, including "in progress" on other hosts, the server will send a deletion request for the files. If you look in your BOINC directory, you'll see a file called stdoutdae.txt. One of the deletion requests will look like this:
[pre]
2008-01-13 00:36:17 [Einstein@Home] Got server request to delete file h1_0625.00_S5R2
2008-01-13 00:36:17 [Einstein@Home] Got server request to delete file l1_0625.00_S5R2
2008-01-13 00:36:17 [Einstein@Home] Got server request to delete file h1_0625.10_S5R2
2008-01-13 00:36:17 [Einstein@Home] Got server request to delete file l1_0625.10_S5R2
2008-01-13 00:36:17 [Einstein@Home] Got server request to delete file h1_0625.15_S5R2
2008-01-13 00:36:17 [Einstein@Home] Got server request to delete file l1_0625.15_S5R2
2008-01-13 00:36:17 [Einstein@Home] Got server request to delete file h1_0625.20_S5R2
2008-01-13 00:36:17 [Einstein@Home] Got server request to delete file l1_0625.20_S5R2
2008-01-13 00:36:17 [Einstein@Home] Got server request to delete file h1_0625.25_S5R2
2008-01-13 00:36:17 [Einstein@Home] Got server request to delete file l1_0625.25_S5R2
[/pre]
Having said all that, it's
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Having said all that, it's worth noting that Einstein is not a good project for people on dial-up, or generally of a nervous disposition. I've just unleashed a cruncher that hasn't done any Einstein work for a while (still working off Christmas indigestion), because it looks as if today's SETI maintenance outage is going to be a doozy. I got two tasks allocated, but well over 60MB of datafiles to search - them's big haystacks. I hope they last a while.