Idiot's Guide to Bunkering on BOINC

[Gorgon]

We can use all the help we can get with the BOINC Pentathlon over the next couple of weeks. Here is an overview of how to get setup on Rosetta crunching COVID tasks for the Marathon and how to configure your systems to store up completed tasks in advance so they can be released when the event starts.

First, if you haven't signed up for Rosetta at home head over to their website and create an account.

Once you've created an account you need edit the account to link it to the LinusTechTips_Team.

 

Now you need to download and install the BOINC Client for your hardware platform.

 

Once you've installed the BOINC software open the BOINC manager and it should prompt you to add a Project. Note that Rosetta is transitioning from using HTTP to HTTPS and the BOINC software all has the old URL so just paste https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta into the Project URL: field to use the new URL so you wont have to switch over mid way through the Competition:

 

If your not prompted to Add a Project just select "Add project ..." from the Tools Menu.

Select "Yes, existing user" and enter the email address and Password you registered with:

and click Next.

 

If you are still Folding while running BOINC remember to tell BOINC to not use all your CPU threads and reserve 1 thread for each GPU you're still folding on and at least 1 or 2 threads for the Operating System so it does not become completely un-responsive.

 

Click "Computing Preferences" from the Options menu to set the restrictions:

Here I've set the client up to use only 75% of my threads so on a 16-thread CPU only 12 would be used for BOINC. I've also told BOINC to store at least 0.1 days of work. This is how often it contacts the Project Servers and Uploads completed work and requests new tasks. I've also configured the client to store an additional 3 days of work so I can save up completed work and release it after the Marathon starts.

 

The "Disk and Memory" Tab in Computing Preferences is where you configure how much Disk Space an RAM the BOINC Client has access to.

Here I've told BOINC it can use all but 5GB of space on my SSD. This is a dedicated Compute machine with only a 120GB SSD so I want to make sure it doesn't run out of space. Season to taste here.

 

I've also told BOINC here that it can use up to 90% of my RAM and no more than 25% of my Virtual Memory (Swap under Linux or the PageFile in Windows)

 

Now that you've set some sane CPU & Memory limits for your use case head back over to the Tasks Tab. Now that Rosetta has been running for a bit you should see some tasks running and some others queued up ready to go.

 

Over in the Projects Tab is where you can Pause a Project (Suspend) or Update it (Send Completed Work and Request new tasks):

You have to click on the Project on the right side to select an action on the left side. On this system I'm "Bunkering" tasks so I've configured it not to get any more tasks.

 

Bunkering involves configuring the client to get several days worth of work in the "Computing" tab of "Computing Preferences" Dialog above. Once you've configured the client to get a few days of tasks you now need to fill up the queue with tasks. We do this by Updating the Rosetta project as long as required to fill the Tasks pane up. This can take a while depending on how many days of tasks you want to add and you have to wait a couple of minutes between hitting "Update" again so you don't overload the server. Just sit back and Relax and bounce between the Projects and Tasks tabs and watch the jobs download.

 

Once we've filled up the Tasks Queue we need to tell the client not to report the tasks as soon as we've completed them so we can horde them until we want to release them.

 

Head over to the "Network" tab in the Computing Preferences Dialog:

Here we're telling the client to limit the upload speed to 10 Bytes per second (0.01KB/s) and Confirm before connecting to the Internet.

 

Next we head to the "Daily Schedules" tab:

and we tell the client to just Upload results for a minute starting at midnight which will effectively prevent any completed tasks from uploading.

 

After the system has completed a few jobs you should start seeing completed jobs sitting in the Tasks queue waiting to be uploaded:

 

So you're good to go.

 

Once it's time to release the Bunkered tasks just remove the Upload time and rate restrictions and then go to the Projects Tab, select Rosetta and click Update.

[Gorgon]

The Rosetta jobs by default target 8 hours of run-time per CPU. To enable smaller jobs you need to go into Your Account on the Rosetta Website and then click on the "Rosetta@home preferences" link then click the "Edit preferences" link and Change the "Target CPU run time" to 2, 4 or 6 hours. I would recommend 4 hours and possibly shorter towards the end of the Marathon.

 

Do note that the preference will NOT take effect until after you click on Rosetta in the Projects tab in the BOINC Manager and click Update.