Unlike the other projects which allocate a lot of virtual memory but use only a small portion for most of the time, this project uses lots of memory and touches most of it all the time. Thus if the machine had less than that amount of ram, paging activity (moving memory contents to disk and back) would go way up and make the machine sluggish. Thus we set the minimum high enough to not cause problems. There are periods of time during which the application has less virtual memory allocated, but when it gets to the points where more is needed, this requires a higher minimum.

If virtual memory were not enabled, then you would find that you might not be able to load some applications for normal work. We have other projects in the works which will need less memory, and will probably have some that need even more.

Viktors/Kevin, on the 'what if'....on dual core machines with BOINC and 750mb (unlikely) or 1gb RAM running a HDC+HPF2 simultaneously..... was that simulated and would that cause disk thrashing?

Just noticing that the manual throttle of 95% in UD agent is shown in the 'i' screen....EXCELLENT. Added UD_8344644.exe and wcg_hdc_tma.exe to the firewall exceptions (in case someone gets stuck)!

Ok - another question:

I see that the project is now selected by default over at My Projects, therefore I assume if you are running Boinc, then it will apply to ALL machines regardless of profile - what happens then in the case of where one of the Boinc machines is not of sufficient spec, will it just reject any HDC units and download any of the others you have selected, or will it try to donload the science and then pause/cause problems?

Is this going to mean that you will have to unselect the HDC project for all your Boinc machines if one of them is under spec, or will you have to run that machine under the UD Agent and select another project? - or worse still run that machine with Boinc under a seperate username?

Is the forthcoming new version of Boinc, or WCG settings in the future going to allow individual project selection for each Boinc machine?

So many questions, so little time....

Well, I turned off HPF2 and FAAH so I had just HDC running. One of my BOINC machines with only 512 Meg RAM got a Message from the server saying it was refused work because it did not meet the minimum RAM requirement for HDC. It did not download science apps, stall or hiccup, just sat there quietly like a good puppy.

No problem. That machine can still crunch HPF2 or TANPAKU.

Thanks Lawrence - I see that you say 'it should not be a problem' - has this been tested, or is it more like hope?

What is not exactly clear is whether it will then just happily download another projects unit without a hitch.

I take it this will also mean you are not going to be able to select HDC only if you want work on all your machines, therefore you will have to accept a mixture of WU's from all selected projects on all your Boinc machines.

Do you know whether there is likely to be the ability to assign projects individually to boinc machines in the furture?

Another question just raised by one of my team members is will the increased HD space required with this project be done automatically, or does it require the profile setting of 'use no more then xxx Gigabytes' to be changed as well, ie if someone has changed the default from 10GB to say 2GB is that going to be adequate?

Ady