On my mac i have 3 user accounts and all 3 users can have access to Boing Manager (BM). Will there be a problem for BMs calculations if all 3 users open it?

Since the three users can't ever be logged in at exactly the same time on the same computer, nor open BOINC Manager at that same time, I don't see how. That said, BOINC Manager is just the Graphical User Interface, allowing the users to easily command and control the BOINC client.

It doesn't do any scheduling of the calculations. That's the BOINC client that does that, while the calculations themselves are done by the project science applications.

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Users on the mac can be left open, one can switch between many users and leave them open while switching, what is interesting and i just found that out now, is that if BM is open by one user, it cannot be open by another that logs in his account, so in other words only one BM at a time can run on a mac!
Ok i think i sorted this out on my own, thanx though!

This thread got me thinking - always a dangerous thing to do on a Sunday morning!

As Jord has indicated, there are two major components of the BOINC program suite.

BOINC itself, often referred to as the 'core client' or just 'client', concentrates on managing the resources inside you computer - starting and stopping jobs, deciding what job to do next, fetching new work, reporting the results of completed work, keeping records and general housekeeping.

Because the client is focused inwards on the computer, it seem right that for ordinary 'in the field' work there is just one copy running per computer. [There are esoteric situations and reasons where more than one copy might be needed, but for general use - no, just the one]

BOINC Manager, or 'The Manager', is a different program with a different purpose. It is focused outwards, on the (current) user, and is used as a two-way communications channel between that user and the inner workings of the client - what's going on, what work is being done, how long before it finishes, is there anything else I need to know or do?

With modern computers allowing multiple users to be logged in at the same time, and fast switching between users - whether for family or business convenience - it would seem to be more appropriate if the 'Manager' was accessible to all users, if that was the security model chosen at installation time.

The current 'one copy open at once' policy for the Manager was instituted because the Manager spends a lot of its time minimised or even hidden in the dock or notification area. People were opening additional copies from the menu, because they didn't know about, or couldn't find, the existing one - so now a re-launch brings any running instance to the foreground instead. Except that doesn't work between different user accounts - and it's really not user friendly to have to go round rootling in somebody else's private user space to close down their copy (which might have been started automatically without them even knowing), before you can see what's going on in your own area - even to pause a GPU so you can watch a film.

So, I think we need to do a little bit more thinking around this area of multiple user information display and control. And while we think about it, that means that trac ticket [trac]#1025[/trac] has to be fixed in parallel.

Back to Zoran's problem. There's a little-known screen which I can't find described in any of the user wikis (though I expect Jord will tell me he has an FAQ for it):


(quite why that is a graphical screen, when I can only access it from the command line, I don't know)

The option of interest here is

/m
--multiple

for allowing multiple instances of the Manager - that would allow Zoran to work as he wishes. It would be a great improvement if that was automatically applied for the first BOINC Manager running in each user space.