The Scottish Boinc Team

Been surfing round the messageboards of various forums, especially Milkyway as its just plain funny listening to the arguments over lowering credit


A topic that has come up a few times is multithreading. As far as I can work out, some processors let you set up "virtual" CPUs so say my dualcore could operate as a quad. And a quad could operate 8 at once

Is this right? if so how does one do it, and if not what the hell is mulithreading?????

cheers

You can run a virtual machine, VMware or Microsoft Virtual PC, inside your existing operating system and thereby run more than one instance of Boinc on one CPU.

However, your physical CPU still has the same number of cores, registers, cache and memory bandwidth, so unfortunately you will not be able to squeeze any more crunching power (flops) out of it.

In fact by running a virtual machine, you will inherently be placing an overhead on the system: the combined computing power available to Boinc will be less than by running just once instance.

There are some advantages to running virtual machines: I ran some 64 bit Linux machines this way when I ran Folding. I also have a business machine that runs Vista native with XP and Win98SE as virtual machines if I need them.