Welcome to the forum.
Hello all,
Recently registered and found out about all these efforts from a book titled ''Ball Lightning" by Cixin Liu. I am running a 'normal' custom pc and use it most of the day for work but planned on letting the machine run processes through the night (or is that ill-advised??) Can anyone post a link to a beginner thread or website for beginners? Not a whole ton of up-front information out there!
Look forward to ''crunching'' with ya'll in the future!
I'm not exactly sure what you're asking. BOINC on the schedule you describe should be fine, if you're asking about wear and tear. That's actually more or less what BOINC was designed to do, run when the computer was idle. Some of us run them constantly now as processors have gotten so much faster. Now, if it's at your place of employment, running BOINC is more a matter of ethics. Unless you own the company or more or less have total say over the equipment you should ask about running BOINC on company equipment, just to be safe. There will be increased power usage and some risk to the machine itself of premature failure although generally I don't think this is a problem today. Make sure you have adequate cooling and keep the machine cleaned out from dust regularly, crunching does push computers harder than most things.
I have an article here for new crunchers, which I hope you'll find useful. You can also check out the
BOINC manual. If you just want to crunch overnight, just set your time schedule, cache and attach to your preferred projects and let it do its thing. There's usually not much for you do after that.
Regarding LHC, the main tip I have is be aware that a lot of their apps require you to have VirtualBox installed. I also had major problems with the Vbox apps making connections to servers literally around the world and so way too much work was failing due to connection errors. The situation may have improved since I was crunching there, but I quit running those apps and now I only run the Sixtrack work, although these days I'm crunching other projects. Make sure to work through the
checklist for VirtualBox work if you insist on running it.