General questions and concerns
This area outlines some of the questions that people have asked regarding United Devices, World Community Grid, the UD/WCG agent, and the answers provided:
Q 1. Doesn't leaving this running affect my hard disk as well, as data will be written out a lot?
A. No. WCG is mainly a memory-bound application. It will save out its present working state to the install folder at time intervals measured in 10's of minutes. The time interval varies by work unit.
Q 2. How concerned should I be about security?
A. Minimal to none. Your machine initiates the communication with the server, the communications between your workstation and the receiving server is encrypted and the working files and final results are encrypted. Unless your machine gets infected by something which is designed to somehow exploit WCG (of which nothing is known at present), or you download your install copy from a site other than IBM and it has been hacked to install a backdoor or trojan, there's no concern. IBM and WCG audit the source code and control the work units.
Q 3. What about power usage?
A. The power difference between an idle CPU and one running WCG at the default throttle of 60% is on the order of 5-10 watts, very minimal for what you and your PC is accomplishing on a humanitarian scale.
Q 4. What about causing an early death to my CPU from overwork?
A. The question of CPU heat and longevity is difficult to answer as I doubt there have been any case studies. Even when a CPU is idle it is still working, just not as hard and therefore not as hot. CPU's are designed, with the proper heat sinking, to handle the work given to it, regardless of what it is. One of the overriding reasons that the CPU throttle value for the United Devices client was scaled back from 100% to 60% was to prevent CPU heat/slowdown issues in specific contemporary machines.
The floating point unit in a CPU, when utilized, typically causes it to run hotter. I suspect that the work units do a lot of floating point so keeping the throttle at the default 60% will keep the temperature increase to a minimum, and easily handled by a properly installed heat sink.
Q 5. How do I monitor the work unit results?
A. The grid website maintains all the statistics and it is very in-depth, it just takes time to get familiar with the site and find it all. There's statistics for users, teams, tasks, etc. Everything is there.
Email the author: Peter Schepers | Last updated: Dec 6, 2006