Son Goku
No lover of dogma
- Joined
- 14 Jun 2004
- Messages
- 1,980
Re: AMD 64-bit Dual Core Processor Club
Perris brings up a good point with distributed computing projects. Reason, one can have the comp work on more then one WU, as each core can do it's own. Whether it's folding, one of the BOINC projects (of which folding will be joining though their BOINC project is in beta, so they haven't widely advertized it yet), or whatever... The prospects of increasing one's credit score, erm I mean contribution 😀 is definitely there, and some have upgraded their comps just for that, hehe
Memory can pose a slight issue, though I'm not sure something else isn't going on in my system with kernel paged pool getting so large, but with 32-bit winXP a 128 MB hard limit is set, and getting close to that hard limit in kernel size seems to pose a slow down of it's own.
Oh, and speaking of memory, it doesn't go without saying that if one's going to run 2 WUs, mind the memory requirements. Either the extra large Folding WUs (the 600+ point ones), or some of these BOINC projects also, take a crap load of RAM per WU. The latter can also make matters worse, as some projects (like Climate Predictor with it's like 1,000 hour WUs, have save points few and far between). The answer is to leave all projects in memory even when not processing, and then x2 if one schedules to 2 cores. With just 1 core and 6 projects memory at the desktop can hover at about 850 MB, without any of my own apps started in the foreground. Only about 350 - 400 to the OS and other stuff, as shutting BOINC down drops it to about here. 450-500 MB x 2 (each WU scheduling to both cores) is a sizeable chunk of RAM, with the only saving grace being that the WU not actively being processed at the moment can be swapped out to the paging file...
Perris brings up a good point with distributed computing projects. Reason, one can have the comp work on more then one WU, as each core can do it's own. Whether it's folding, one of the BOINC projects (of which folding will be joining though their BOINC project is in beta, so they haven't widely advertized it yet), or whatever... The prospects of increasing one's credit score, erm I mean contribution 😀 is definitely there, and some have upgraded their comps just for that, hehe
Memory can pose a slight issue, though I'm not sure something else isn't going on in my system with kernel paged pool getting so large, but with 32-bit winXP a 128 MB hard limit is set, and getting close to that hard limit in kernel size seems to pose a slow down of it's own.
Oh, and speaking of memory, it doesn't go without saying that if one's going to run 2 WUs, mind the memory requirements. Either the extra large Folding WUs (the 600+ point ones), or some of these BOINC projects also, take a crap load of RAM per WU. The latter can also make matters worse, as some projects (like Climate Predictor with it's like 1,000 hour WUs, have save points few and far between). The answer is to leave all projects in memory even when not processing, and then x2 if one schedules to 2 cores. With just 1 core and 6 projects memory at the desktop can hover at about 850 MB, without any of my own apps started in the foreground. Only about 350 - 400 to the OS and other stuff, as shutting BOINC down drops it to about here. 450-500 MB x 2 (each WU scheduling to both cores) is a sizeable chunk of RAM, with the only saving grace being that the WU not actively being processed at the moment can be swapped out to the paging file...
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