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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Retired Forums
Forum: Member-to-Member Support [Read Only]
Thread: Running SETI@Home and Grid Agent |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 11
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
When running both SETI@Home and SETI Monitor the Grid Agent is starved for CPU cycles. All of the applications have the lowest CPU priority yet SETI is hogging the CPU. Is there a work around that would allow all of the applications to get an equal share of the CPU?
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Adinolf, I don't run the SETI agent any longer so I can't recall what its process name is but probably what is happening is that the SETI process has a higher priority assigned to it than does the WCG process.
If you launch your task manager (Ctrl-Shift-Esc) and go to the Process tab you'll find a process that is consuming most of your CPU cycles - in your case this will probably be the SETI process which I'll call seti.exe. To see the process priority click View, Select Columns, and then check off "CPU Time" and "Base Priority". Click OK Now you will see seti.exe has "Below Normal" priority set. (The options are Realtime, High, Above Normal, Normal, Below Normal, and Low). I'm assuming seti.exe is Below Normal based on your description. Now you will also see a process called WCGrid_Rosetta.exe which is the World Comm Grid process that takes CPU cycles. It by default runs at a "Low" system priority so it will not get any significant CPU time because the seti.exe process is consuming 100% of available resource and is at a higher priority than WCG's agent. SETI should have  defaulted the process to "Low" considering the nature of the program.If you want both agents to run and get equal time then either change the seti.exe process to "Low" or change the WCGrid_Rosetta.exe to "Below Normal". The OS will take care of splitting time evenly between the two grid agents. Cheers, Shadowman (Greg) |
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Alther
Former World Community Grid Tech United States of America Joined: Sep 30, 2004 Post Count: 414 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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When running both SETI@Home and SETI Monitor the Grid Agent is starved for CPU cycles. All of the applications have the lowest CPU priority yet SETI is hogging the CPU. Is there a work around that would allow all of the applications to get an equal share of the CPU? I finally had a chance to really put some time into the problem. I downloaded the BOINC client and am running SETI@Home version 4.07. The problem is that the SETI client is running at priority 6, while the World Community Grid client is running at priority 1 (lowest possible), thus the SETI client will consume all available CPU cycles (except when blocking...then our agent gets a little blip of CPU time). Why they do this, I can't tell you. "How can this be?" you might be asking when the Task Manager shows that they're both running at 'Low' priority? What the Task Manager is showing isn't the priority of the application, but really the priority class of the application. Within each priority class are 7 relative priorities. While both SETI and Rosetta are of the same priority class, their relative priorities are different (SETI being higher). While you can change the priority class of a process via the Task Manager, you can't change its relative priority. Because of this, there is no way to get both SETI and Rosetta to run where they equally share the CPU. SETI will always have a higher priority (barring setting Rosetta to the RealTime priority class). While you can have both installed on your machine, you can only run one or the other due to SETI running at a higher priority. - Rick Alther World Community Grid Application Developer
Rick Alther
----------------------------------------Former World Community Grid Developer [Edit 1 times, last edit by Alther at Nov 17, 2004 6:04:36 AM] |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
you could uninstall seti@home, run the Human Proteome Folding Project for a few months, then go back to seti. Wander back and forth. That seems like a simple solution, as seti runs at a higher priority than the grid agent.
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
The application below should allow you to set a throttle on the SETI CPU usage so that it leaves some processing time free for WCG.
http://bednorz.uni2.net/anyland/threadmaster/threadmaster.htm Alternatively, you could set WCG to 'below normal' - 1 and SETI to 'low' - 6. That might cause WCG to hog all the CPU time or it could be close enough that SETI gets in some work whenever WCG pauses. If nothing else you could alternate priorities for them. |
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Alther
Former World Community Grid Tech United States of America Joined: Sep 30, 2004 Post Count: 414 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Alternatively, you could set WCG to 'below normal' - 1 and SETI to 'low' - 6. That might cause WCG to hog all the CPU time or it could be close enough that SETI gets in some work whenever WCG pauses. If nothing else you could alternate priorities for them. This won't work for the reasons I posted above. Without using special tools, you are unable to change the relative priority which is what is causing the difference in priotity between SETI and Rosetta. - Rick Alther World Community Grid Application Developer
Rick Alther
Former World Community Grid Developer |
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jeffwy
Advanced Cruncher Taiwan Joined: Nov 17, 2004 Post Count: 77 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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This issue is really too bad, I have been a Seti user for years and now I am having a huge dilemma. Now that I have found WCG, I would like to run both, but, as I have also been doing my own playing around it just doesn't seem possible as Seti is taking up a major of the CPU usage. Even setting WCG high and Seti low, I think the most I got out of WCG was 5%. I am not using Bionic yet either, but the same problem seems to exist. I need to go read the other threads here I thought I saw a question relating to using a dual CPU motherboard, maybe this is the only answer to the problem...
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Hi.
I haven’t tried this yet as I just read this thread so let’s kick this thought around. If you have a robust system that can hyper thread and load in something like VM ware, perhaps you can create two virtual machines (on top of the base real one) and run the two programs together?? |
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jeffwy
Advanced Cruncher Taiwan Joined: Nov 17, 2004 Post Count: 77 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Can you provide the name of a stable, usable and well know software application to do this without crashing my machine? I have used VM programs before and 9 times out of 10 I run into more problems than it's worth.
----------------------------------------Obviously if we are running both of these programs on the same CPU both of them will run slower than if only one were running, but if we can get both fo them to use around 49% of the CPU while idle that would be the optimal setting. |
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Alther
Former World Community Grid Tech United States of America Joined: Sep 30, 2004 Post Count: 414 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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I need to go read the other threads here I thought I saw a question relating to using a dual CPU motherboard, maybe this is the only answer to the problem... You should be able to run both on a dual CPU motherboard. While I haven't tried it, as long as SETI isn't multi-threaded, it should work. If SETI is multi-threaded you'll see the same problem as the SETI threads will take over all the CPUs. The same would apply to hyperthreaded CPUs, but since it's not a true SMP scenario, you won't see a true 50/50 split. SETI will still take a majority of the CPU, though how much is hard to say. - Rick Alther World Community Grid Application Developer
Rick Alther
Former World Community Grid Developer |
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