Tasks "Running" but no progress made

Hi hermanm, welcome to the project!

Your laptop shows up as having a AMD 7700 series (CapeVerde) GPU and indeed you have both CPU and GPU tasks. Are the 4 'in progress' tasks all CPU tasks (S6 Gravitational Wave Directed Search)? You have 6 GPU tasks showing on the website (Binary Radio Pulsar). Are any of those in progress? Have you changed any project specific preference settings (eg GPU utilization factor of BRP apps) or are all your settings at default values? I'm a bit surprised that you don't seem to have a GPU task in progress.

Have you tried stopping and restarting BOINC? If not, give that a try and once restarted, have a look at the event log window - In BOINC Manager -> Advanced view, Advanced -> Event Log. If you can copy and paste about the first 40 or so lines of startup messages, it will give a good indication of what BOINC thinks about your machine. Because you have a laptop and because you may be crunching on all CPU cores plus the GPU, you may have a heat problem. You need to monitor that fairly carefully.

That issue only applies to the new Fermi Gamma Ray Pulsar (FGRP3) run so it's certainly not your problem since you only have GW CPU tasks in your cache of work.

EDIT: I see that archae86 has replied whilst I was composing my reply. I think that limiting BOINC's use of your CPUs to 50% or 25% would be a good idea, but please do show us the startup messages. You should also install a CPU temperature monitoring utility to see how hot your CPUs are running. If you intend to crunch with your GPU, you should also use a tool to monitor load and temperature there as well.

In the Manager Advanced view, choose 'Options...' from the Tools menu.

On the first (general) tab, check 'Enable Manager exit dialog?'

I'm sorry for the slow response. I've had some commitments and haven't been able to respond to you immediately.

In addition to and in support of what others have mentioned, I'd like to make some suggestions. Firstly, here are some particular lines from the startup messages with important bits in bold. A lot of this was already mentioned by archae86.

(Note that 'Resuming GPU computation' doesn't appear in the messages.)

By default, it looks like BOINC is going to halt progress for just about any reason it can think of. Sure, it's important not to let crunching interfere with your day to day use of your computer but you may well find that you can ease restrictions without suffering a dramatic penalty. The best way to find out is to start 'full throttle' and then apply restrictions if you need to. On your account page you have 'computing preferences' and 'project preferences'. Here is a list of the ones I would use for your 'full throttle' trial (all computing preferences).

• * Suspend work while computer is in use? -- no
  * Suspend GPU work while computer is in use? -- no
  * Suspend work if CPU usage is above -- 0
  * Leave tasks in memory while suspended? -- yes
  * On multiprocessors, use at most -- 100%
  * Swap space: use at most -- 90%
  * Memory: when computer is in use, use at most -- 90%
  * Memory: when computer is not in use, use at most -- 100%
  

Once you change the preferences on the account page, you need to select the Einstein project on the projects tab of BOINC Manager and click 'update'. You should then have 4 CPU tasks and one GPU task, all making progress. To confirm this (and get an idea of the rate of progress), note the starting % values of all 5 running tasks and then note them all again at the end of a test period, say 30-60 mins later. Try not to run anything else that is compute intensive whilst the test is on. Each running task has an elapsed time counter and all time values should be incrementing steadily every second. Calculate the approximate time to complete a task with the following formula:-

Task time (mins) = Selected time interval (mins) X 100 / (Ending % done - Starting % done)

After the test period is finished but whilst still running 'full throttle', try using your computer for your day to day activities and see how responsive it feels. Try to work out if any particular part of your system is suffering. If performance is not acceptable, the first thing to try is setting the "use at most xx% of the processors" to 50% and then clicking 'update' to read the new setting from the website. If you prefer, you can set these things locally through BOINC Manager (Tools -> Computing preferences) but be aware that local preferences (until you clear them) will trump website preferences. With the change to 50%, you should see only 2 CPU tasks running instead of 4. The GPU task should still be running. This should reduce, in particular, the time taken for CPU tasks. You can easily confirm this by running the previous test again. The GPU task may perhaps speed up slightly as well although I suspect not much.

If you try these things, let us know how you get on and we can work out what to do next based on your report. My experience has been that the science apps run at low priority and do tend to get 'out of the way' when necessary so I don't normally use the the restrictive preference settings that tend to cripple BOINC. It very much depends on what your 'normal everyday work' is though :-).

I'm running Linux on all my machines these days. A couple of years ago, when I had some Windows boxes, I used a utility called CoreTemp. I also used GPU-Z for GPU monitoring. There are quite a few choices that are easily found with Google.