Hey all,

Recently I've started working at a company where part of the job is stress testing custom-built computers for stability and cooling performance before they're sent to customers. Right now they're simply running a CPU stress test which, as a computing task, is quite useless. I'm trying to come up with an improved stress testing procedure and as part of that, I would like to have the computers do some kind of useful work, and WCG tasks in BOINC are a prime candidate. However the nature of BOINC tasks doesn't mesh well with the requirements for this test and it will require some creative thinking to make it work.

The test must be:

- Entirely portable - long-term installation or individual configuration are deal-killers, this has to be a plug & play operation that can be started with a few clicks and leaves the computers as they were before. Portable applications that can run from a removable device (perhaps with help from networked storage) or a network-booted environment are both options.

- No long-term commitment - testing may run for as little as 1 hour or as long as overnight. Considering the length of BOINC tasks, this means that a task may have to be started on one machine and continued on another. We also want a quick start, no more than 5 minutes of waiting before processing begins.

- Automatically fitting the host machine - these computers have different numbers of apparent cores and we want them all to be used. We also want to use lots of RAM and may intentionally tie up RAM unused by BOINC tasks with some other RAM test such as a memtester job.

- Scalable - the number of computers testing at one time generally ranges from one to six right now, jobs that have been started should continue to be processed by any available computers to minimize the chances of a started job expiring before it's finished.

Some ideas I've come up with so far:
1. Network-booting into a diskless beowulf cluster node. Low-friction and meets all the goals, but huge initial setup effort, and inefficient.
2. Network-booting into one of a number of regular desktop GNU/Linux installations with BOINC installed, with some auto-config scripts. Relatively easy and efficient, but interferes somewhat with the "no long-term commitment" and scalability goals.
3. A number of portable BOINC installs with auto-config scripts. Similar to the previous option but even less elegant :-P

Any more ideas? Could BoincTasks be helpful for controlling job distribution with ideas 2 or 3 to keep jobs from sitting idle when a Linux netboot install isn't booted / portable agent isn't running?