Hi all - I have a question about preferences that I am hoping someone can help me with.

I have 7 machines doing SETI work, one of which I would like to tweak the preferences for. The machine in question http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_host_detail.php?hostid=4844389 is an 8-core Xeon (well, 4-core with 2 processors each) with the CUDA device. As you can imagine, it churns out quite a lot of work - but it is also quite noisy when it does (all the fans are at 100% speed so it sounds like I'm at the airport when I come into the room!).

In any case - what I would like to do is to set the preferences for this machine as follows:

1) while the computer is in use (to be defined either by hour, or the use of keyboard/mouse), only work at, say, 50% of CPU (GPU can work 100% since it isn't making much noise anyway)
2) while the computer is idle (during the night and over weekends, for example), work at 100% of both the CPUs and GPU ("airport noise").

So far, I could only find the preferences that say "process work while computer is in use" - but that's an exclusive yes (100%) or no (0%) setting. I would like the computer to enter one "mode" while it is in use (the 50% above, in order to still do some work while being relatively quiet), and a different ("airport noise") mode while I am away from the computer.

I am using the Lunatics optimized apps (if that makes any difference, even though it shouldn't) and BM 6.6.38, on an XP Pro SP3 machine. I am not posting the cc_config.xml nor global_prefs_override.xml files since this is not a question about a problem per se, but rather a question about achieving something I have not been able to, at least thus far.

If I need to provide any further details to the above post please let me know and I would be happy to.

Thanks in advance to all!
davor

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I think there are no preferences for what you'd like, but you could create a batch file to stop the BOINC client, change the name of global_prefs_override.xml (or two files with the required setup) and restart the client. In the xml file, there would be a line like <cpu_usage_limit>50.000000</cpu_usage_limit>, where the default is 100.000000.

Another option could be the TThrottle program by Fred - efmer.eu/boinc, see here on the BOINC dev boards. As far as I know, it has no timetable feature, but perhaps you could post a request for enhancement ;-)

Gruß,
Gundolf

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Computer sind nicht alles im Leben. (Kleiner Scherz)

SETI@home classic workunits 3,758
SETI@home classic CPU time 66,520 hours

Thank you for this suggestion Gundolf - it looks like TThrottle will work. After installing it and playing with options, it seems to be doing what it says it does. In addition, to address the time requirements, I have included it in the "Scheduled Tasks" list to start at 8:00am every workday, and set to "kill it" at the end of the day (hopefully killing it won't present any problems in terms of remembering the settings I made in the options of the program). So I'll test this for the next few days and see that it fits my needs.

Thanks again - all the best,
davor

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