How we installed and tested UD/WCG in our training labs
Our initial attmpt to support the World Community Grid was to install the UD client as that was the recommended client from the WCG website. Both lab rooms were installed very similarly. The only significant difference was one room only ran during screen saver mode, and one ran full time.
- WCG is installed into a Deep Freeze Thawspace (on G:)
- Set the Screen Saver option in one room.
- WCG converted to a system service.
- Set the DEFAULT user screen saver to UD.SCR, and set to 60 seconds (30 would be better)
- Rebooted every day (by Deep Freeze) as 7:00 AM.
- All machines are still in the default grid profile (1Gb, run all the time, all work units enabled)
- No registry key or environment variable set (yet). I do intend to introduce this in the next lab rebuild. It will likely be set to ~80.
Likely the best solution (for optimal crunching results) is not to enable the default user screen saver, nor the user screen saver. The graphics drawing takes CPU time which can be best used for calculations and not eye candy. Set the CPU throttle to ~80%, and simply monitor the uploaded results to see what PC is not working and needs attention.
It was found that the UD client was not entirely stable when running as a service, and this was the one feature we needed since the lab is idle so much. Randomly, machines would stop processing work units and the UD service would stop. It was unreliable enough to make us test BOINC instead. See the BOINC pages for the test results.
Email the author: Peter Schepers | Last updated: Mar 1, 2007