I have a 6 core and 4 core CPU system both running BOINC. Right now, all 6 cores on the one system and all 4 cores on the other are working on individual tasks running at 90% of each core. My question is, is there a way to get all 6/4 cores to work on 1 task at a time? It would seem to me that the computers could get through tasks quicker that way and possibly knock out more tasks compared to only 1 core on 1 project.

Just a thought.

im no expert in this but i don't think there is. My understanding is only multi-core work-units cant use multiple cores on one task at once. but I could be wrong

There are projects (MilkyWay and BURP come to mind) that have multi-core tasks, that will use all of your CPU cores for a single work unit. Whether or not that provides any sort of benefit to computation depends on the application and its coding; Janus has said over at BURP that with their app it's about equivalent to multiple tasks running simultaneously--no particular performance gain. Other projects might have more optimized apps, but at the very least your memory overhead should be lower since you're not running multiple replications of the same application at once. Also, it looks a little cleaner in the BOINC manager if you have a host with many cores; the task list on my 8-core i7 can get a little overwhelming if it has tasks queued up for all 8 cores, the GPU, and any non-CPU tasks.

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