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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Retired Forums
Forum: The New Members Forum [Read Only]
Thread: HOW DOES IT WORK? |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 3
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
most people must be wondering how does this work, and how people can use the IDLE resources for science?
I am one of those people, I dont have the answer, can anyone fill me in with the info. thanks |
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Alther
Former World Community Grid Tech United States of America Joined: Sep 30, 2004 Post Count: 414 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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most people must be wondering how does this work, and how people can use the IDLE resources for science? I am one of those people, I dont have the answer, can anyone fill me in with the info. thanks I assume you are asking how it is we are able to use your idle CPU time? I'll try to explain it without too much jargon  Your computer runs a lot of tasks called processes. All processes on your system have a certain priority associated with them. Most of these run at 'normal' priority. Also, for most people, their computer really isn't doing much and the CPU is busy maybe 10% or less of the time. This other 90% of the time, the CPU has nothing to do. This 90% is called idle CPU time. The grid agent works by running a specific process (the Human Proteome Folding process in this case) at the lowest priority possible. Windows will always run a higher priority process over a lower one. Thus after all your 'normal' or higher priority processes have finished using the CPU, instead of the CPU going idle, our low priority process finally gets to run. Thus we are essentially taking what would normally be your idle CPU time and getting work out of it. Hope that helps. - Rick Alther World Community Grid Application Developer
Rick Alther
Former World Community Grid Developer |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
most people must be wondering how does this work, and how people can use the IDLE resources for science? I am one of those people, I dont have the answer, can anyone fill me in with the info. thanks I assume you are asking how it is we are able to use your idle CPU time? I'll try to explain it without too much jargon Your computer runs a lot of tasks called processes. All processes on your system have a certain priority associated with them. Most of these run at 'normal' priority. Also, for most people, their computer really isn't doing much and the CPU is busy maybe 10% or less of the time. This other 90% of the time, the CPU has nothing to do. This 90% is called idle CPU time. The grid agent works by running a specific process (the Human Proteome Folding process in this case) at the lowest priority possible. Windows will always run a higher priority process over a lower one. Thus after all your 'normal' or higher priority processes have finished using the CPU, instead of the CPU going idle, our low priority process finally gets to run. Thus we are essentially taking what would normally be your idle CPU time and getting work out of it. Hope that helps. - Rick Alther World Community Grid Application Developer Bump! |
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