Hey Monocle


What broken link


regards

JP

CPU wise, yes, the science applications (BOINC itself does not matter much from this viewpoint) will stop.
But if your application is so hungry that several Gigs of RAM need to be swapped you might probably notice it.
Once it's done there should be no difference if your use of this hungry application is sustained.
If the CPU needs of your hungry application are low, or if you make long enough pauses science applications will get the remaining CPU time and that might cause some more swapping if your RAM is not sufficient to satisfy the needs of your application and the science applications altogether.
If you experience this behavior and if you are frequently using hungry applications of your own you will benefit from selecting projects with low RAM usage to avoid swapping. See Sekerob's "The WCG Projects, Systems Usage Matrix" to help you select projects with the smallest RAM footprint.

If my answer is not sufficient and/or you want to discuss this topic any further please start a thread of your own with a specific title to avoid going on off topic here.

Cheers. Jean.

There is currently another ongoing discussion The Average WCG Cruncher which can help answer most of your valid points which are indeed often mentioned..
Please keep in mind that WCG is mainly addressing these "normal crunchers" wanting to help and not DC addicts who crunch for the most credits whatever the purpose.

WCG is following the general crediting recommendations of the BOINC project and does not want to enter this vicious circle: if it started to credit more these grids which are already crediting exaggerately for attracting DC addicts would simply raise their crediting rates.

When this point is raised (i.e. frequently) I usually mention the fact that IBM is widely seen as paranoid about security and that, still, it installs WCG as part of the standard software it delivers to its employees' workstations.
IBM is so confident that it leaves its employees free to manage "their" WCG as they wish if they are interested (choice of teams, projects, etc...). Others are crunching in the background under the "IBM" banner without having to take care of it.

Remember that "normal members" are not supposed to start running their PCs 24/7/365 if they were not already doing so before for other personal reasons.

Regarding screensaver problems I am not the best person to answer them because, like most home users with LCD displays, I do not really need one, so I don't use one.
I think that most problems are linked to particular quirks (e.g. drivers, OS, hardware,...) in those configurations but I may be wrong.
Anyway, for those who must lock their PC for security reasons (like IBM employees mentioned above) they can always (and better) use the blank screensaver of their OS, which will also save CPU cycles.

Please note that when I say that WCG is mainly addressing "normal PC users" it does not mean that it is not interested by DC addicts. It is only that it is not in this particular population that WCG is hoping to attract really new DC participants "en masse".

Cheers. Jean.

yes personaly i normaly just tell people not to run a screen saver program and just turn there monitor off instead... it saves your monitor and it saves energy so you can spend it doing DC projects...

I must confess that there was a time when I was a points chaser, but putting up with poorly run projects with little scientific or academic merit got old rather quickly.

WCG, Rosetta, Einstein, QMC and SIMAP are the blue chips among the projects.