@ fosking

Purely curious on my part, noticed from jonnieb's stats that you put 4days of RT crunching yesterday which is no mean feat.

If you don't mind me asking, what crunching machine(s) are you running here?

As per Soong's insanely good point-scoring, recently, graphics cards seem to be the in-thing when it comes to Points-scoring.

I'm currently running 11 devices (listed from memory): a dual quad-core Xeon physical server (16 threads), an 8-core VM (8 threads), five 4-core VMs (20 threads in total), a dual dual-core Xeon (4 threads - no hyperthreading), a dual-core Xeon (2 threads - no hyperthreading), a dual single-core Xeon (4 threads), and my quad-core gaming PC (8 threads plus 2GB GTX-460 GPU).

So, that's 62 threads in total, that can all be running their own work-units (I'm currently running the graphics card with 2 simultaneous WUs so make that 60 CPU plus 2 GPU WUs at any one time).

However, that little lot pales in comparison to Soong's setup, when it comes to Points-scoring - mine averages around 200-225k Points per day (compared to Soong hitting 1.5mil recently); however, mine does tend to get 45-55 days Run-Time each and every day...

RAM, I've not really noticed make all that much difference, apart from determining what you can run (ie. multiple CEP2 WUs) - my gaming PC has 12GB of DDR3, whereas each of the five 4-core VMs is running off just 768MB of DDR3 RAM (I do have to restrict what they can run, but what they do run tends to be at normal speed for the CPU they all have access to).

Hyperthreading is something that some Intel processors make use of, whereby it "splits" a physical processor-core into two logical/virtual cores, so as to make carrying out two simultaneous tasks possible.

Looking at Intel's processor-encyclopaedia website (link for your CPU, I think), it doesn't look like yours has hyperthreading-ability, I'm afraid...

Easiest way to check, though, is to say yours is a two-core processor - does BOINC run two or four work-units, at the same time?

In general, the more processing cores the better and for each of those cores, the more Ghz the better. So you can then crunch more units in a day.

Memory is good, especially if you are running the CEP. Also, not sure if you know, but CEP has long runtimes for each workunit, most of this is taken up with 2 of the 16 sections of the unit. If you are running CEP, try to either run your machine all the time or only switch off when it is not crunching sections 2 and 12. I check the "checkpoints" of the unit I am crunching to make sure that neither 2 or 12 is being processed as these can take several hours to process which means that if the machine in shut down during this section then you will lose hours worth of crunching and will need to re-do that amount of work again. Hope this makes sense!

As for the GPU crunching on your GFX card, no idea as I only crunch using the CPU.


EDIT: just noticed your last post, if yours if a quad core, you should be crunching 4 WU's at the same time unless you have set your preferences to only use 50% of the processors.

@ Fosking, your Graphics card on your quad core is good for GPU crunching, if it isn't already, you will lose 1x cpu core if you decide to get gpu running, but the points are worth it.

Might even be able to get more than 1 gpu running on it at one time, but if your a noob, better to start slow, don't want to confuse you or melt your brain.

For GPU (assuming your interested and you wish to), Log In / cliick Device Manager / click Default (or what ever your quad core is listed under?) / about 1/3 way dow, tick "if my computer can process work on my graphics card", and also tick "if there is no work available for my compter"/ Scroll down to the bottom and click Save.

Then on Boinc, click Projects Tab and click update, and away you go