In an effort to improve communication between the BOINC project and the community about the future of the BOINC project I'll be holding a weekly Q&A on my blog.

I'm fielding this as an experiment right now, as a way to find out the kinds of things the community is interested in knowning.

If there is a lot of interest in this sort of thing maybe the guys who publish bunc will be willing to pick it up as part of their newsletter.

What do you all think?

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----- Rom
BOINC Development Team, U.C. Berkeley
My Blog

Its a good idea but I don't think you will be too busy responding to your blog, the novelty of you answering questions about BOINC will eventually wear off.

So long as you make some posts to your blog now and then to update on the world of BOINC that should be enough to keep folks happy.

Besides the majority of questions people have are to do with individual projects rather than BOINC its self

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Join us in Chat (see the forum) Click the Sig

I want to run BOINC on multiple computers (2 or 3) on my small home network. Are there any easy ways of doing that so that they all count to my totals. I'm not really into network management and it looks quite complicated to configure the Manager or client to run with simple network - the guides I've brwosed to seem quite complicated. Any simple tips welcome.

JohnKen

Hi JohnKen,

If you have a network already, the easiest way to get BOINC to run on all computers, is to install it on all computers, then attach to whatever project(s) you run, using the "use existing account" option, with the same email address and password.

Are you running one or more projects already?
Which BOINC version do you run?

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Gret - thanks for that - I'll set that up.

JOhn

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Forget to mention - I'm currenty running 7 projects - with the lions share going to SAH and Claimate Change. My BOINC is 5.4.11.

John

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I only asked that info in case you wanted a step by step explanation on what to do. :)

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Rom, in your blog link I found pics of the Geneva pan-galactic workshop;

http://www.romwnet.org/pictures/Default.aspx?folder=Pictures%2f20060921+BOINC+Workshop+2

I hope you don't mind that I'm posting a link to this photo page on the three cpdn forums where the telephone interviews with Dr Anderson are announced by Tigher. So climate crunchers can see our guys in Oxford, Carl and Tolu.

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No problem.

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----- Rom
BOINC Development Team, U.C. Berkeley
My Blog

what is the disk space tab in the boinc client for?

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You see there how much space on your disk is currently being occupied by your project(s). If you see enormous amounts or sudden big changes, you know you need to find out what's happening.

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thanks mo.v

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I have a few questions for someone in the know on the cutting edge of BOINC development listed in order of importance to me.

1. I have a 64 bit dual AMD processor machine with 2 cores each plus 4 GB ram. Also 1.6 TB disk. OS wise I'm running a dual boot configuration with Windows XP as the first Op sys and Win Server 2003 X64 as the second. I want to get off of XP one of these months (not years) as soon as another major application I run for work gets converted to X64. I was running Win Server 2003 X64 on weekends. Now with BOINC on the XP side I'm reluctant to shut down and boot up in 03 X64. Question is, if I boot X64 is there any way to install or run BOINC in the Server 2003 X64 OS such that it will work on the existing projects? Does it require registry info in order to execute? If not perhaps I could launch it in place. ?? If it requires a complete dual installation and I point the 03 X6 installer to the XP BOINC program files will it execute then with the active projects or am I likely to create a mess. Thought I might ask this first before creating the mess. ::)

2. Does the "max CPU" parameter have a top limit equal to number of hardware CPU's or is it really an OS task maximum? Can safely BOINC run more tasks at once than there are hardware cells?

3. Is there a way to limit the number of tasks any one project can open independently of the others?

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Ty < finally.. thinks he's got it fixed now

I have some questions back and some answers.

1. Are you using the 64bit BOINC client, or the 32bit BOINC client?
If the 64bit BOINC client, I think you can point to the same BOINC directory without much of a problem.

If one is a 32bit client and the other a 64bit client, I would install the 64bit client to its own directory and just attach it to your projects separately (using the same login and password).

And if you don't trust it anyway, or think you'll muck up, always install to its own BOINC directory.

2. It's 8 CPUs which can get work. You can easily have more CPUs in the computer, but they won't get work from the same project. I am not too sure I understand the latter part of your question, could you rewrite it?

3. Like in Project A gets 1 task and project B gets 3 tasks?
You could work around with setting the Project Resource share, that way you can tell which project has priority. But it's quite difficult to say that one project can download 1 task and the other 3, as not all work runs the same amount of time. So for instance, a CPDN model takes over 3 months to run, while a Primegrid task takes mere minutes.

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My guess is that he's been a bit too busy with getting this new BOINC out. But why don't you email him and ask? :-)

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I have some questions back and some answers.

1. Are you using the 64bit BOINC client, or the 32bit BOINC client?
If the 64bit BOINC client, I think you can point to the same BOINC directory without much of a problem.

If one is a 32bit client and the other a 64bit client, I would install the 64bit client to its own directory and just attach it to your projects separately (using the same login and password).

And if you don't trust it anyway, or think you'll muck up, always install to its own BOINC directory.

2. It's 8 CPUs which can get work. You can easily have more CPUs in the computer, but they won't get work from the same project. I am not too sure I understand the latter part of your question, could you rewrite it?

3. Like in Project A gets 1 task and project B gets 3 tasks?
You could work around with setting the Project Resource share, that way you can tell which project has priority. But it's quite difficult to say that one project can download 1 task and the other 3, as not all work runs the same amount of time. So for instance, a CPDN model takes over 3 months to run, while a Primegrid task takes mere minutes.

Reply
1. I just today upgraded to 5.10.7 installed over the last release. No problem on XP. I haven't tried it on the 03x64 OS yet. What I want to avoid is having BOINC setting the Win Server 03 X64 as a completely different client with a new set of Wu's. Reason is I only run 03 X64 on weekends and while I'm on it the XP Wu's won't progress if its set up like two different computers. Right now XP OS is on C: drive with BOINC installed in "program files". Win Server 03 x64 boots on H: drive. If I boot 03x64 (H:) and point the 03x64 launcher at the exe on C: will it come up and then be lost or corrupt something or will it work? There are no BOINC entries in the Win Server 2003 X64 registry at this time. If approach will likely fail then if I install BOINC again (same release) over the existing one by executing the installer from the 03x64 platform with the -x64 installer- pointed to the C: drive\program files\BOINC instead of the H:drive will that work? It will cause registry to get populated but I don't know if the environment context will be right and depending on the coding could damage the XP install.

2. For this question, what I'm asking is, if I have 4 cores (which I do) and I lie and say I have 6 will it open and run 6 tasks? What are the ramifications?

3. I was wondering if there is a way to set an upper limit on the number of tasks the scheduler can be allowed to open on a per project basis. (e.g. CPDN max task count is 1 because they are so long, ufluids max task count is 2 because they are so short, etc.) Reason I ask is that would prevent one project from unbalancing a mix with a flood of tasks. This has happened.

Thanks in advance for your time.

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Ty < finally.. thinks he's got it fixed now

1. No, that isn't possible.
BOINC will detect what operating system you are using and make a hostID on the project with the CPU, amount of RAM and that OS.
Signing up with the same computer but a different OS, will make a new hostID.

So you can't run results from the other hostID. Sorry.

2. No.

BOINC will ask the OS how many CPUs there are. Real or virtual ones (think hyperthreading CPUs). And then, even if you fill in 14, but only have 4 CPUs, BOINC will use the maximum amount of CPUs that you truly have: 4.

3. There isn't a way for you to set it. The maximum amount of results that you can download per CPU, per 24 hours, is set by the project. You can check up on that in your preferences, under the list of your computers, click on the hostID number and you'll see a mention of "Maximum daily WU quota per CPU".

If that isn't enough for your computer to keep busy with, you can ask in the project's forums if the daily quota can go up.

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2. For this question, what I'm asking is, if I have 4 cores (which I do) and I lie and say I have 6 will it open and run 6 tasks? What are the ramifications?

You can lie and tell Boinc you have any arbitrary number of CPUs using the <ncpus> tag in the cc_config.xml ovverride file. It has sense for testing purposes, but will cause unnecessary context switches and thrashing the CPU cache (because more applications will share less cores).

I was personally doing this while crunching Malaria WUs - they were (or still are?) prone to stop crunching (or not being preempted, or not starting to consume CPU time after being selected) and effectively causing the CPU to sit idle until someone (me) will notice it. Forcing Boinc scheduler to behave as with 2 CPUs caused to run apps much less effectively, but in case of such acident the other app could run using he whole CPU.

Peter

1. No, that isn't possible.
BOINC will detect what operating system you are using and make a hostID on the project with the CPU, amount of RAM and that OS.
Signing up with the same computer but a different OS, will make a new hostID.

So you can't run results from the other hostID. Sorry.

2. No.

BOINC will ask the OS how many CPUs there are. Real or virtual ones (think hyperthreading CPUs). And then, even if you fill in 14, but only have 4 CPUs, BOINC will use the maximum amount of CPUs that you truly have: 4.

3. There isn't a way for you to set it. The maximum amount of results that you can download per CPU, per 24 hours, is set by the project. You can check up on that in your preferences, under the list of your computers, click on the hostID number and you'll see a mention of "Maximum daily WU quota per CPU".

If that isn't enough for your computer to keep busy with, you can ask in the project's forums if the daily quota can go up.

Reply

1. Most other applications can't work in a dual boot configuration either but for most of them it doesn't matter. Mozilla and Thunderbird are two very popular exceptions that work in a dual boot config where it does matter. They have an environment pointer in a file that can be altered to point to a different disk. This is just one of many problems I'm dealing with as part of a migration to 64 bit computing. I'll work around it but I guess this question just became my first BOINC feature request.

2. Ok mostly just curious. I could probably get a few more flops out of it with an extra task to two but maybe not.

3. I'm interested in limiting the amount of work I'm getting instead of getting more. I've been using the no new task button to keep any one project from dominating the mix. I don't want a lot of suspended work out there. That's manual intervention. I guess this is feature request number 2 for what its worth.

I've been crunching on grid.org for years until they closed down May 1. That was a very crude engine compared with this one. I'll get used to this one eventually.

Thanks again for your fast response.

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Ty < finally.. thinks he's got it fixed now

2. Ok mostly just curious. I could probably get a few more flops out of it with an extra task to two but maybe not.

Rather a few less.

Peter