I just picked up a raspberry pi 2. It's a great little machine. I decided to see how much the various overclocking settings really mattered, so I set it to work on some Einstein@home computing.

With some mild overclocking, it was processing WUs in about 25 hours. I just set it to "turbo" and noticed that the speed is about the same as far as I can tell, but it is processing 3 work units at a time whereas last time (on milder overclock settings) it was running 2 .

Is the increased number of WUs the result of more cycles being available? Somehow I had gotten the idea in my head that one unit would be run per core. Have I been misled?

And FWIW, does anyone have any general wisdom as to BOINC on the PI?

First off I would upgrade yourself to Jessie if you are not already running it (Raspbian is currently on Wheezy which is older). That will get you a more up to date BOINC client (7.4.23) from the repro.

It should be running 4 tasks at a time. You may need to check your BOINC memory settings and CPU% settings. As its only got 1Gb of memory you'll need to set Memory usage to something like 75% when in use and 90% when idle.

Projects that support the Pi are Asteroids and Einstein. Claggy also did a Seti Multi-beam app but you'll need to do some fiddling to get it working. Asteroids have an old app for the original Pi which doesn't have NEON support and work units take too long on the Pi/Pi2 now. Einstein tasks are smaller and their app, if you run an up-to-date BOINC client, will use NEON. If you run the old BOINC client you get the old app which is much slower.

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MarkJ

Projects that support the Pi are Asteroids and Einstein. Claggy also did a Seti Multi-beam app but you'll need to do some fiddling to get it working. Asteroids have an old app for the original Pi which doesn't have NEON support and work units take too long on the Pi/Pi2 now. Einstein tasks are smaller and their app, if you run an up-to-date BOINC client, will use NEON. If you run the old BOINC client you get the old app which is much slower.

Eric has released a freshly compiled r2929 app by myself at Seti Beta, only two and a half days ago.

Claggy

MarkJ:
Thanks for the heads up. I'm new to linux, so my questions might be kind of dim. I googled up Jessie, and the install for the Pi (the 64 bit ARM) looks pretty straightforward. NEON was a little murkier. Is it part of Jessie?

If I'm reading this right, if I install Jessie and go to the repo, I will get a newer and better version of BOINC. And I should probably fiddle with my computing prefs so that it can handle the 4th simultaneous unit.

Am I close?

Neon is a set of CPU instructions that the ARM processor has in later versions. Apps compiled with Neon support usually run faster. The original Pi did not have support for it.

If you are overclocking its recommended to get heat sinks for the CPU at least, the can run fairly hot now. You can usually find them on eBay and so on.

As for Jessie it's the current release of Debian. Unfortunately the Rpi foundation have yet to update to it. Their latest Raspian build released 5/05/2015 is for the older Wheezy version of Debian. To get it to update you need to edit the sources.list and change the repo references from wheezy to Jessie. After that do an apt-get update. Apt -get dist-upgrade. It will take a few hours. Make a copy of your SD card before starting so you can go back if needed.

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MarkJ