Just set up my first dual core cruncher and have a few questions. Is there any way I can crunch FreeHal units on both cores as it is not CPU intensive? Also, when first running I noticed a Cosmo wu and an ABC wu running concurrently. The ABC unit has stopped and nothing has taken it's place. Cosmo continues to run. This may be because AQUA is next in line and it appears flagged to run on both cores. This kind of seems like a waste of a core, but the checkpointing times must vary. Computer is an AMD athlon dualcore 4450e 2.3GHz w/3MB RAM running WinVista sp2.

FreeHAL isn't core-depending. You can set how many FreeHAL-WUs you would like to run at the same time.
Go into your FreeHAL-account, then the FreeHAL@Home preferences and choose how many "Maximal concurrent work units" you want to run.

I am set at 25 now which I believe is the max. Is it possible to somehow run 50? Also, when I saw AQUA flagged to use both CPUs, I assumed it would crunch twice as fast. This doesn't appear to be the case. On my single core, I am at 41min elapsed--38% complete. On the dual core 16min elapsed--15.5% complete. CPU times for both boxes are not far off from elapsed times.

I don't think BOINC is set up to make use of multiple cores for the same task yet; each core gets its own task(s), which run independently of task(s) on other core(s).

It should be possible. Some team mates told me, with the use of Virtual Machines you can run up some more eventually.
But don't ask me how, I never tested that.

Oh, I forgot: the FreeHALs are not really absolute non-CPU-intensive, sometimes they can eat indeed much ressources, "the more the worse" I would say . Especially when there are faulty WUs which happens from time to time they can use up all CPU power.


Edit:
@noderaser: Did you ever crunch an AQUA WU? The apps there are really programmed to use multiple cores on their WUs.

Never noticed FreeHal using alot of CPU, but at times it sure eats up the RAM! I'll keep a closer eye on it.

BOINC is set up to make use of multiple cores for the same task, but the scheduling algorithm is still flaky in that aspect (and others too ), which results in the behaviour skivelitis described.

Gruß,
Gundolf

Ah, I remember this being an issue but never read that it had been resolved.

It works at AQUA which is the only Project that I know of that has even tried to use more than 1 Core Per Task ...

That's what I said

The restriction I mentioned is with scheduling projects in mix with AQUA, which tends to leave cores unused.

Gruß,
Gundolf

Yes I've noticed that myself, when running AQUA with other Projects, the other projects sometimes will only use 1 or 2 or 3 Cores instead of the 4 on a Quad. I usually either run AQUA exclusively or just don't run it at all when running with other Projects. Suspending AQUA will get all 4 Cores running again even if there are AQUA Wu's Present in the Cache ...