Does boinc automatically support 2 and/or 4 CPU processors? Can I dedicate all 4 of those cpus to one unit for one site?

Will it automatically run on the 2 or 4 CPUs if I use XP, vista, windows media edition?

I'm trying to decide if I should go with a faster 2 CPU computer, or a 4 CPU computer with 4 slower processors.

Thanks.

Does boinc automatically support 2 and/or 4 CPU processors? Can I dedicate all 4 of those cpus to one unit for one site?

Will it automatically run on the 2 or 4 CPUs if I use XP, vista, windows media edition?

I'm trying to decide if I should go with a faster 2 CPU computer, or a 4 CPU computer with 4 slower processors.

Thanks.

This sounds as though you're talking about multi-threading.
Neither BOINC nor any of the current projects can do this.
It's one core = one work unit.

So, 2 core processors will run 2 WUs at once, and 4 cores will run 4 WUs at once.

The number of cores that BOINC is allowed to use can be set in preferences if you don't want all of them being used by BOINC.

Along this same line and to help with the question. I have a system with 6 CPU's and boinc downloads and runs 6 WU's in parallel.

Next question.

What is the CPU limit of boinc per system?
I have done 6. 16? 32? At some point it is going to matter.

Thank you,

Calvin

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You can set the limit in your 'general preferences' on the 'your account' page (on any project website). Note that this setting is shared between all projects.

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That part I am aware of. I guess what I am getting at is, is there a limit to the number of CPU's that boinc can put to use in a single system. Maybe the answer is no?

Thanks for the quick responce,

Calvin

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That part I am aware of. I guess what I am getting at is, is there a limit to the number of CPU's that boinc can put to use in a single system. Maybe the answer is no?

There is no hardcoded limit, but there may be "practical" limits. I don't think anybody has tried taking the client to such extreme systems.

What's sure is that you need a lot of RAM, since there will be one instance of the science application for each CPU available. There is also one shared memory segment for each app (for client-app communication); and the OS limits how many shmem segments you can have.

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I don't think anybody has tried taking the client to such extreme systems.

Some did. At least I do remember one fighting with Boinc benchmarks on the older Sun UltraSPARC T1 CPU "Niagara" (8x4=32 processes, but just one FPU). Back then it was not able to finish 32 benchmarks until the timeout :-) without changing Boinc core.

And then there was someone on Seti with a cluster of maybe 256 AMDs...

Peter