Too many "Invalid". There may be an ongoing problem with this project (I'm not sure) but certainly you are having trouble crunching work units that others are completing successfully (you are getting "Invalid" not "Error").

So, I think you should opt out of this project, at least for now.

I'll check in with the techs later on about the overall project health.

There do seem to be typically far more invalid results than valid results (i.e., a quorum of ten, replication reaches 30 - 60 before it finds ten which match). The other 20 - 40 are usually either 'invalid' or 'error'.

This has to be a project issue rather than a user issue. In fact, that was why I was asking about homogenous redundancy issues a week ago.

One would not normally expect results of climate models to be bit-identical in any case.

As uplinger noted - we had an error that was causing a lot of invalid results. The fix was released on Saturday and we are starting to see the workunits complete quite quickly now. We have 41 workunits from the initial batch of 82 complete and we expect to see the remaining 41 finish off quickly. Sometime this week we will be sending out the 2nd generation of workunits (i.e. the second two weeks of the simulation that continues from the first two week period).

As far as validation goes, we are using our standard homogeneous redundancy settings. Work units are assigned to one hr class: Linux, Windows, Mac-Intel and Mac-PPC (except in this case we don't have support for either of the mac platforms yet). Within this hr class the results can be bitwise compared (they are exactly the same). We have one file that is returned that lets us know that the overall file is the same data as well as tells us the hash of the individual files. This allows us to know that the overall file is valid.

However, due to the way that BOINC works - specifically the transitioner (which is the state engine for the workunits), we cannot mark any results as valid until we have the entire set of files returned to the server. We have spent some time looking at the transitioner to see if their is a way to allow users to know if there file is valid and get their credits while the workunit waits for the result of the results to be returned. However, this would be a pretty substantial re-write of the transitioner and in order to keep us from deviating from the BOINC source base, it would need to be written in a way that would be general so that it could be given back to the BOINC community and we would stay in sync with other BOINC projects. That is a very large work effort and at this time we are going to have to accept that results will set in 'INCONCLUSIVE' until we get valid results for each piece of the overall file.

Hopefully this helps explain some of the behavior of this project.

Thanks uplinger and knreed!