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Help / Advise

After some help

I've just rolled the boinc client out accross one of my UK offices as a test before probably rolling out accross all of our PC's. Shot up into the top 5 daily producers which is cool.

Problem I have is our standard desktops untill recently have 256mb of ram but HT processors, so boinc goes great two procs I'll run 2 wu's at a time, problem is at around 100meb of ram required for each wu it causes a lot of paging which in tern is giving a noticable drop in performance on my clients. This intern give me a noticable increase in hassle when users ring up and whinge. Tried getting them to turn it off an on again... but... :P

What I'd like to be able to do is set rules some how, ie if the client has 256mb ram then only run one wu at a time but if the client has 512+ then go ahead and run two at a time coz it causes no problems. I know I could set the processor usage in the profile but that means me running a report off of the machines with boinc and 256 meg of ram then moving them onto a different profile. I know this doesn't seem like a lot of work but I'm running it on about 80 machines at the moment and will probably roll it out accross our uk offices soon meaning it will be 300+ machines and I'd rather have a more automated way of doing it. And I'm also going to go about upgrading the 256meg machines to 512mb over the next month or so and I'd have to then move them back to the other profile!

Hope that makes sense!

comdot
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[Mar 10, 2006 11:49:48 AM]   Link   Report threatening or abusive post: please login first  Go to top 
keithhenry
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Re: Help / Advise

Anything that I can think of involves something you'd have to do to each machine. sad Maybe you just want to set you default profile to run one WU until you finish the upgrades and then just change the profile to run two.
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[Mar 10, 2006 12:26:12 PM]   Link   Report threatening or abusive post: please login first  Go to top 
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Re: Help / Advise

Yeah i thought that but that then means my machines that do have 512mb of ram only run 1 wu at a time when they could run 2.

Might have to put up with that i suppose!
[Mar 10, 2006 12:49:13 PM]   Link   Report threatening or abusive post: please login first  Go to top 
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Re: Help / Advise

Hi comdot

As keithhenry rightly pointed out, using two different device profiles is probably the way to go, (Just from my experience, running two threads on Hyperthreading PCs seems to make them a bit sluggish even with 1GB RAM, but that obviously depends on what you're running)

How about writing a computer startup script that detects the PCs RAM and then edits the account_www.worldcommunitygrid.org.xml file in the BOINC directory to use one of two profiles?

Something like
Get the Device Profile from account_www.worldcommunitygrid.org.xml
Get the PC's RAM
If RAM is 256 Then Device Profile should = 'Work'
If RAM is 512 Then Device Profile should = 'School'
If Above isn't true
Stop BOINC Service
Edit account_www.worldcommunitygrid.org.xml Device Profile
Start Service

You can ditch the script once all of the PCs have been updated and all of them are using the right Device Profile.

Hope that helps

Slug
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Re: Help / Advise

My personal opinion is that doubling up on HT is likely to result in sluggish operation in many circumstances, without much gain. It's one of those things that can be argued either way. I always point to the fact that a HT processor only has one Floating Point Unit.
[Mar 10, 2006 1:44:12 PM]   Link   Report threatening or abusive post: please login first  Go to top 
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Re: Help / Advise

Thanks for all your help,

I've decided to run 1 unit at a time now on all the desktops and moved all my multi processor machines to a new profile that allows them to run two.

Happy crunching.
[Mar 10, 2006 3:58:21 PM]   Link   Report threatening or abusive post: please login first  Go to top 
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