Hi,

We have just decommissioned a few 5 year old servers with 2 x 8 core Xeons (32 cores with hyperthreading) and I got permission to run World Community Grid projects on them. I installed BOINC and was surprised to find it only running at 1.2GHz (base is 2.4GHZ) at about 30% CPU utilisation. I disabled hyperthreading in BIOS and now it's running at about 2.9GHz but only 15% utilisation! The tasks are now taking about 3 times longer than my desktop and 4 times longer than a 10 year old Dell server running 2 x 6 core Xeons. When I suspend BOINC from running the speed goes back up to 2.4GHz and above.

Is this a limit/bug with the BOINC client or the project? Seems a waste of resources if I can only do half the number of tasks and they are taking 3-4 times longer than hardware twice as old. I thought this would be a decent increase in performance, not a step backwards.

Any advice appreciated. Thanks.

Which operating system are you running?
Did you install (newer) chipset drivers for that OS?

Hi Jord,

I tried server 2016 and am now running it on Windows 10. I did all updates but haven't looked specifically at the chipset manufactures drivers so will make that my next stop.

Temp throttling? Are you monitoring the temperatures? WCG tasks use 100% of CPU. 32 threads 24/7 in a 1U case?. I have two dual xeon servers, motherboards pulled from 1U racks. On one (16 threads)I had to use high speed cpu coolers. On another one, 24 threads, I got tired of the noise and put in DIY liquid cooling. Both are in open air racks. TThrottle can show temps and if you use Boinctasks it can report temperatures back to you.