Currently running:
POV-Ray (5 instances, each rendering part of an animation)
Firefox & Thunderbird
Handbrake
CloneDVD
UT3 Editor

My poor dual core can't keep up :(

I think I'm one of the few home users who could get some real use out of 
an 8 core machine :)

-- 
...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

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Chambers escribió:
> POV-Ray (5 instances, each rendering part of an animation)

> I think I'm one of the few home users who could get some real use out of 
> an 8 core machine :)

I have been rendering on these:
http://impfarm.imp.org/boinc/show_host_detail.php?hostid=123
http://impfarm.imp.org/boinc/show_host_detail.php?hostid=113

Not mine.

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> Chambers escribió:
>> POV-Ray (5 instances, each rendering part of an animation)
> 
>> I think I'm one of the few home users who could get some real use out 
>> of an 8 core machine :)
> 
> I have been rendering on these:
> http://impfarm.imp.org/boinc/show_host_detail.php?hostid=123
> http://impfarm.imp.org/boinc/show_host_detail.php?hostid=113
> 
> Not mine.

Hey, nice to see that the IMP is doing something still - the website 
hasn't had much activity lately (though I haven't been reading the forums).

Is it possible yet for users to submit jobs, or do the jobs still need 
to be manually added by an admin?

-- 
...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

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Chambers wrote:
> Hey, nice to see that the IMP is doing something still - the website 
> hasn't had much activity lately (though I haven't been reading the forums).

OK, correction: the forum is offline, and the website has been inactive 
for more than a year?!?

Since I'm still interested in contributing CPU power, if nothing else, 
to the IMP, is there a way to join your BOINC team?  (I tried the way 
your project page at http://impfarm.imp.org/boinc/ states, but it gave 
me an error.  I either need an invite code, or you need to accept public 
applications again).

-- 
...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

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Re-posting. I'm not sure if it's only my ISP acting up. According to 
internettrafficreport.com, South America has an speed index of 39!


 > Nicolas Alvarez wrote:

 >>> POV-Ray (5 instances, each rendering part of an animation)
 >>
 >>> I think I'm one of the few home users who could get some real use 
out of an 8 core machine :)
 >>
 >> I have been rendering on these:
 >> http://impfarm.imp.org/boinc/show_host_detail.php?hostid=123
 >> http://impfarm.imp.org/boinc/show_host_detail.php?hostid=113
 >>
 >> Not mine.
 >
 > Hey, nice to see that the IMP is doing something still - the website 
hasn't had much activity lately (though I haven't been reading the forums).
 >
 > Is it possible yet for users to submit jobs, or do the jobs still 
need to be manually added by an admin?
 >

There is a web-based job submission script for the impfarm software, but 
it wasn't too tested... I don't think anyone has sent any work on 
impfarm for a year.

What I linked to is all my own stuff. It's technically independent from 
the IMP farm (the one with the Perl client); just happens to be hosted 
on IMP server. Job submission there is even worse. I manually run a 
script on the server, via ssh.
And the script is kinda ugly. Coincidentally, I was *just* about to 
rewrite to support dynamic tiling: changing the size of tiles to try 
making them all take approximately the same time (to avoid 3-second 
tiles with just the background and 1-hour tiles in the middle of glass 
objects).

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> Since I'm still interested in contributing CPU power, if nothing else, 
> to the IMP, is there a way to join your BOINC team?  (I tried the way 
> your project page at http://impfarm.imp.org/boinc/ states, but it gave 
> me an error.  I either need an invite code, or you need to accept public 
> applications again).
> 

The project started as Renderfarm@Home. Reached like 1000 users. But 
after a few months I lost my free hosting (the friend who was hosting it 
had to reduce his ISP plan). Then I sort of revived it on IMP server. 
The plan was just testing it for a start, and then moving Renderfarm 
database there, but it never happened (lack of time, motivation... busy 
in *other* time wasters...). So currently it's in a state of having an 
even more hackish backend than the original Renderfarm@Home, and with 
less users.

Plan now is somehow merging both databases (if a user was on both 
projects, his credits would get added, for example), but that's 
something else I haven't got around to. I don't want to open account 
creation and watch the user list grow again... The less users, the 
easier it will be to merge (but I have to do it!).

Not to mention the big changes I'll have to do on my wrapper when POV 
3.7 is out. More like a rewrite. I'm interested in many of the 3.7 
changes, and multithreading isn't one of them! Mainly: the new state 
file for resuming renders, and the cleaned-up internals that would make 
my modifications less "invasive".

Lately I have been busy making a screensaver for PrimeGrid (another 
BOINC project), and I may even get paid for it, so I try not to get too 
distracted :)

PS. this became somewhat on-topic about POV, which is off-topic for 
.off-topic. Should we move to povray.general?

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are you sure you're able to simultaneously browse the web, read the mail, edit a
game map and tweak povray renders?

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nemesis wrote:
> are you sure you're able to simultaneously browse the web, read the mail, edit a
> game map and tweak povray renders?

Well, Firefox and Thunderbird just run in the background, and every few 
minutes I check them to see if anything interesting has been added :)

The POV renders are, as I said, animations that will probably run for 
several more hours.  As each one finishes, it'll make more CPU time 
available for the others, so they should finish faster, et cetera.

Likewise, CloneDVD (which has now finished) and Handbrake (which has 
not) are background tasks.

So, that leaves UT3Ed, which was nearly unusable.  So, I took a break 
from it to give Handbrake a chance to finish encoding, and played some 
flash games on the web (which I found were almost as CPU intensive as UT3!)

-- 
...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

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> So, that leaves UT3Ed, which was nearly unusable.  So, I took a break 
> from it to give Handbrake a chance to finish encoding, and played some 
> flash games on the web (which I found were almost as CPU intensive as UT3!)

I'm still in the look for a good game to play while waiting for renders. 
Playing a CPu-hog game while waiting for a render to finish is 
counter-productive. My biggest problem isn't intensive games... but 
games that always use 100%. Doesn't matter how fast your CPU is, always 
100%. It's clear they have some busy loop (polling instead of blocking 
for events, for example).

Bejeweled 2 is great but eats 100% CPU (well, only one core). I can't 
figure out why... If I use it in windowed mode, I notice it doesn't use 
CPU while the window is unfocused. However, mouse hover effects still 
work while window is unfocused, and CPU usage isn't very significant, so 
it's not the graphics. Busy loop on the sound handling?

I remember a Sega emulator that used 100% CPU, unless sound was disabled 
and VSync enabled. So, sound was eating all CPU, and video was rendering 
as fast as it could instead of keeping a constant framerate (VSync would 
keep its framerate locked at your monitor refresh rate).

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it seems to me it is your PC who is in need of a less CPU-intensive user. :P

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