I have a diverse collection of CPUs (PowerPC G4 and single/dual CPU G5, various Pentium 3's and 4's, AMD64, Core 2 Duo, etc). These machines have various strengths and weaknesses, e.g., one might be unusually good or bad at floating point, others have various generations of SIMD instructions, different cache sizes, etc.

I'd really like to see each project provide a list of "preferred" and "non-preferred" CPUs to better help me decide which projects to run on which CPUs.

Has anything like this been done or proposed? Thanks.

cpdn (climate prediction dot net), has a list of requirements:

No non-Intel Macs (And even then, increase the stack file size)
At least 1.6 GHz processor speed (If you want a model to finish in your lifetime)
At least 512 Megs of ram (If you don't want the swap file usage to wear out your hard disk in a hurry, and/or your models to keep crashing due to lack of resources)

That's true Les. Most projects (I hope) put at least minimum specs for their work. But the OP is asking about preferred machines.

Personally, I'd rather not see that on a project page. Or at least not with that wording. "Preferred" makes it sound like we don't want anything else.

I don't mind a statement that says (in more professional wording) Windows/Mac/Linux/AMD/Intel/whatever machines just suck on our work units. If you have one of those, you might consider choosing a different project.

That said, I think there's a page in the Unofficial BOINC Wiki that outlines minimum requirements for each project. But I don't think it has relative performance of different processor or OS types.

---

Kathryn :o)

I think that "preferred" is the wrong word for BOINC projects.
It's more: "Whatever works". And that's mostly a matter of looking at the projects and seeing whether they have apps and requirements for whatever computer a person has.

E.G. For some people, climate models run fine on AMD computers. For others they keep crashing.
And the only way to find out seems to be to try it.

Perhaps, if "preferred" has to be used, for cpdn it's: computers that don't keep crashing models. Which brings me back to my first paragraph.

BOINCstats has a long list of projects down the left hand side. While they're not 'hot linked', they do give project names to search for.
APS@home has very minimal requirements, but it also hasn't been heard from for sometime.

PS

Phil
Ignore the slashes in these posts.
There is a fault in reality. Or, at least, in the software here. :(

I have a diverse collection of CPUs (PowerPC G4 and single/dual CPU G5, various Pentium 3's and 4's, AMD64, Core 2 Duo, etc). These machines have various strengths and weaknesses, e.g., one might be unusually good or bad at floating point, others have various generations of SIMD instructions, different cache sizes, etc.

I'd really like to see each project provide a list of "preferred" and "non-preferred" CPUs to better help me decide which projects to run on which CPUs.

Has anything like this been done or proposed? Thanks.

Won't help you now, but a project to help with exactly that is planned

BOINCstats has a long list of projects down the left hand side. While they're not 'hot linked', they do give project names to search for.

The first listing of projects "Active Projects" just takes you to their stats, but the second listing "Status Schedulers" will take you to a projects web site when you click on it's name.

---

CIC1=CC=C(C2=N[C@@H](CC(OC(C)(C)C)=O)C3=NN=C(C)N3C4=C2C(C)=C(C)S4)C=C1

I can only speak for Rosetta which likes:
large cache
fast FPU
extensions aren't used (i.e. SSE2/3/4 / Altivec)

so these are the best choices:
Core2
Athlon64 / Opteron (1MB cache = better)
Barton core AthlonXPs
P4Ds do reasonably well.

Smaller cache CPUs and PPC CPUs don't do as well.

The RAM requirements are up to around 250MB/core (just for Rosetta) although it's usually a fair bit less than this.

Having said that, I've got a few P3s that run Rosetta fine (especially the 512KB Tualatin core ones).

HTH
Danny

---