I used to be a SETI contributor wayyyyy back before BOINC and I used a command-line version.

Fast forward to today.

I work in a shop where I have access to an IBM H chassis blade server. It has 10 blades. Each blade has 2 physical Xeon processors. Each processor is a quad core 3Ghz and 32 Gigs of RAM. We are running the full VMWare ESX enterprise on the blades. It's a new system and I would like to stress these processors a bit and see what it'll do. What better way than BOINC?

Now I'm a Microsoft guy. No Linux, Ubantu, etc, experience. I'm willing to try it though, if I can get help/documentation.

I've dabbled with an XP session. But for some reason, it won't run more than 3Ghz, no matter what configuration I run it. Dual/single proc. I setup a VMWare resource pool for 10Ghz available. Still sits at 3ghz. I'm guessing this is just a Windows or BOINC thing and a Linux or some other edition would work better.

I downloaded a Ubantu VMWare appliance I'l probably try next. But before I head down that road, I thought I would ask if there is a better way to start making these Intel's heat up for me.

TIA. 92Merc

Possibly 10 x 2 x 3GHz = 60GHz.

Which isn't how BOINC works. If you have a 3GHz processor, then the max speed is 3GHZ. With 20 processors running 20 work units simultaneously.

With VMWare, you can setup a virtual machine with 1,2,4 logical processors, regardless of what you actually have. From my reading and little testing, unless you need dual processors, go with a single.

Then with VMWare resource pools, you can assign a virtual machine with how many gigahertz you want. You can assign it all you want, but it'll only go up to the maximum the physical server will allow. But VMware looks at one blade as 27 Gigahertz of resources available.

As far as threading goes, VMware manages that. So in a single processor virtual machine, the VM only knows one processor. But if I give it 10 Ghz in the resource pool, it'll take up to 10 Ghz.

I dabbled with a VM cloned bare bones Win2k8 Data Center edition. It behaves properly. I have it 10 Ghz and it ran 10 Ghz with a single proc. So I'm guessing my issue above was related to limitations of XP.

Next step, I'll play with that Linux link and see what it'll do.

Thanks.