It appears that if I leave BOINC running on my new MBP, after a few hours of use the system hangs. The trackpad is the only thing that operates.

I've shut down BOINC for the last day and no hang. Before that, I'd get 2 or 3 in 24 hours. Its hung on screen saver and also when active. I was updating World of Warcraft (lots of animation in the login screen - not actually playing) and when the system hung, the mouse still worked over the frozen animation.

Some folks are telling me its a bad factory load of OS X, but I'm doubtful. BOINC really maxes out the new Sandy Bridge CPU and I'm thinking there's a problem.

I set BOINC to only use 80% processors in an attempt to tone down its CPU demand, but the system still hung.

Any way I can test this without reloading OSX? I didn't see any log failures after the freeze.

Current config:
Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro8,3
Processor Name: Intel Core i7
Processor Speed: 2.3 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 8 MB
Memory: 8 GB
Boot ROM Version: MBP81.0047.B04
SMC Version (system): 1.70f3

Temp didn't appear to be the issue. It spiked when I fired up BOINC, leveled out, then hung after 10 minutes. Other times it take hours to hang.

Temp didn't appear to be the issue. It spiked when I fired up BOINC, leveled out, then hung after 10 minutes. Other times it take hours to hang.

I suspect that your problem may be caused by the MacBook Pro's automatic graphics switching. It may be switching the active graphics processor from the CUDA-capable NVIDIA GPU to the less capable Intel GPU while running a CUDA application.

For more information, please see [trac]#996[/trac] and http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/GPU_computing#Things_to_be_aware_of, which now says:

"Some newer MacBooks have dual GPUs with automatic switching. BOINC won't detect the NVIDIA GPU unless it is currently selected. You can force selection either permanently or temporarily using a third-party utility."

Please be sure to post back to this thread to let us know whether this fixes your problem. If it does fix it, that will allow us to file a system crash bug with Apple, which may give it a higher priority with them.

---

Charlie Fenton
BOINC / SETI@home Macintosh & Windows Programmer

It looks as if Bernd Machenschalk of Einstein@Home is actively working with NVidia on the problem: http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/forum_thread.php?id=8761&nowrap=true#110999

Seems to be something related with the use of the GPU. I deactivated this option in the Preference pane and now is working well.

BOINC has to do something to fix this bug.

I do not think it is a Mac problem.

Try it you’re self and keep me posted.

Same config but 2.2 GHz and 4 GB of mem.