I have recently become aware of a problem whereby BOINC Manger wastes available Idle CPU (and GPU) Resources, which occurs when:-

(a) There is a long running Task, usually from Climateprediction.net, which has been assigned 'High Priority'.
(b) There is a Multiple CPU Task in the schedule, usually from Milkyway@Home. In practice, since the ONLY such Tasks that I have seen require 4 CPUs, such Tasks effectively BLOCK any lower priority Tasks from running.

As single CPU Tasks with higher Priority than the Multiple CPU Task are completed, they are NOT replaced by other single CPU Tasks, which are BLOCKED by the waiting Multiple CPU Task, so that progressively more and more of the available Idle CPU (and GPU) Resources are NOT utilised. Eventually, the situation is reached whereby ONLY the long term 'High Priority' Task is left running on one CPU, and ALL the remaining available Idle CPU (and GPU) Resources are NOT utilised! This situation will remain for many days, or tens of days, until the long term 'High Priority' Task completes, when the Multiple CPU Task will run, usually completing fairly quickly, when things will return to normal unless the circumstances repeat themselves.

Whilst BOINC Manger handles this situation without difficulty, there is no doubt that it represents a complete waste of available Idle CPU (and GPU) Resources. I assume that eventually there will be a new version of BOINC Manager which handles this situation more efficiently, but at present the only solution that I can see is for manual intervention by the User. Is any one aware of, and/or working on this problem?

Alan Jordan.

I am assuming you see this in some 6.10 version of BOINC?
You haven't yet tried to reproduce this with the latest available development version, 6.12.26?

And I also assume that you know it isn't BOINC Manager that's doing this, that BOINC Manager is in reality the GUI that allows you to give commands to BOINC and see what it is doing?

Anyway, the 6.12 range of BOINC has multiple fixes towards running multi-threaded CPU applications together with single-threaded CPU and GPU applications. The Milkyway (mt) and AQUA applications are multi-threaded, what you mean with multiple CPU. Only when you can reproduce your problem with the latest 6.12, then the developers will want to know about it.

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I should have mentioned, I am running BOINC Manager Version 6.10.59 under 32-Bit Ubuntu Linux 11.04, on a Desktop with an Intel Core2 Quad CPU (Q9550), with 8GB of RAM. I have no other issues with BOINC Manager.

Alan Jordan.

Then please, goto http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download_all.php and fetch 6.12.26, install that one and test again.

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Many thanks! Am now running 6.12.26, and will see how I get on with this.

Alan Jordan.