Hello everyone! I have a question about using multiple computers.

I have been using BOINC for a little over a year, but I've just been letting it do it's thing and haven't really figured out the optimum setup yet. I have been using a PC laptop from the beginning and just bought a Macbook Pro and put BOINC on it (which is outperforming my PC, doing twice as much work in much less time!). But I'm still not convinced that it's working as efficiently as it can. There are two projects that I am involved with:
Einstein@home and Milkyway@home

The PC does 2 tasks at any given time, one from each project. The Mac does 4 tasks at a time, 2 from each project. I guess this is because the number of CPUs?

Since I now have two computers, would it make more sense to dedicate one computer to one project and the other computer to the other project?

Also, if I were to add a third project, how should I implement that efficiently?

If anyone needs more info about my setup/configuration/preferences, I'll be more than happy to reply with that info. Thanks!

-Chris

(And, as a side note)... After running BOINC almost constantly for the past 6 days on my incredibly expensive Macbook Pro I began to get concerned about heat issues. I haven't found any application yet that allows me to set a max temperature for my CPUs (like TThrottle, which I have on the PC). Instead, I found an application that allows me to control fan speed, which I promptly set almost to the max, 6000 rpms. It's a high speed, and it's loud, but I would much rather hear fan noise than to know that I'm shortening the life of my CPUs and battery, among other things inside the computer. And I would definitely much rather cheaply replace a broken fan than to have to replace an expensive CPU. Anyone else concerned about heat should consider this as well. :)

Yes, a computer runs one task on each CPU.

On the CPDN project a lot of people have also noticed how fast many Macs are. This may be partly because of how particular climate model types are compiled for Mac (as opposed to the Windows and Linux compilations) but I think it must also be that Macs themselves do run fast. We have also noticed that the reliability of Macs is high.

You will probably do well to keep two or more projects on each computer. Sometimes a particular type of task can make heavy demands on a particular computer resource. It may demand lots of RAM. It's better if not all the tasks on a machine are demanding the same thing at the same time. A mixture of task types from more than one project will reduce the probability and frequency of this happening.

To choose an extra project you can look at the list of recommended Boinc projects and choose the one you think will be most useful. Look at its website first to see whether it usually has work. The announcements and server status page should give you a good idea of the situation. Try it first just on one computer to see what its tasks are like. If you want and out of interest, try a different third project on your other computer. If you don't like what you get just set the project to No new work.

If you want marvellous graphics that show you what your new project's task is actually doing and producing all the time it's running, choose CPDN! It's worth it for the experience of the graphics even if you only ever run one climate model.

The announcements and server status page should give you a good idea of the situation.

And curious minds shouldn't overlook acompaning forum eather. If the forum doens't have loads of 'WTF?', 'insane', 'God, please, make it stop', etc then probably the project is OK too.

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I'm counting for science,
points just make me sick.

Yes, I agree. A helpful and polite forum is, I think, essential to trouble-free crunching. There are also a very few projects without a forum; I prefer not to crunch for them.