I have a laptop in which I first installed 6.10.43, and now 6.12.34. On both occasions, I discovered that the default for all four profiles for GPU was yes. While I believe that this should not ever be the default, I can understand that on the first install I might have had to put up with finding this out the hardway - way too many credits.

But after making the change in all four defaults to say no to GPU crunching, and not removing BOINC from Program Data when prior to installing 6.12.34 I uninstalled 6.10.43, I find that wow, again way too many credits and, oh boy, there it is in the profiles, GPU yes. This should not happen.

I will be moving into GPU crunching in a new desktop in January or February, and I will assign one of the four profiles to handle that. I would never choose to put a laptop on GPU crunching. I do not understand why, especially after I have changed all the profiles, any version of BOINC would change my settings.

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Just found one machine still running 6.10.43. So, just for drill I installed 6.12.34. Guess what. GPU Yes on all four defaults.

Not good.

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Why not good? BOINC will try to use all the supported hardware out of the box, but it'll also by default set it to use only when the computer is idle.

But just to be clear, where do you look for how this GPU is set to use?
Web preferences?
Local preferences?
Some place else?

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Hey-

I read your FAQ. I have no problem, I turned GPU off in the projects that are in the BOINC Wiki that I run, SETI, Einstein, Milky Way.

I saw egad 16000 credits. Thanks, but I average 10-12,000. But I had been through this before with this laptop, when I first got it, over 20,000 credits a day for several days before I figured it out. But I did figure it out. So I knew what to do.

So, O.K., for me not a real problem.

But, I think with so many laptops in use, it is simply not prudent for GPU's to be opted in by default. Heat, heat, heat.

I actually have a useable GPU in a desktop that I also will not turn on because of heat. The desktop was not configured with GPU crunching in mind, so there is not sufficient cooling.

My new beast, January or February, will be a desktop with twin GTX580's. Modest but quite usable. There will be liquid cooling for GPU crunching and a hyper threaded six core CPU. Don't tell my wife.

I was very impressed with the numbers at GPUGrid, less than 3000 users, less than 3000 hosts, and yet they do over 300 TeraFLOPS. That is amazing.

It's always nice to know you are there. I saw that you wrote almost all of the BOINC FAQ. That is amazing.




6,000,000 credits in the next couple days.

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But, I think with so many laptops in use, it is simply not prudent for GPU's to be opted in by default. Heat, heat, heat.

Which is why the default setting is to use the GPU only when the computer is not in use and then only after the default 3 minutes of idleness.

It's to make it easier, so all the capable hardware is used by default, when you first install BOINC.
But the user is never relieved of responsibility, you will always have to check if everything works OK and whether you want BOINC to use all that. If not, you have the choice to not use that piece of hardware any further, or change the way in which it is used even further.

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