Hey there,

I’m running BOINC since SETI started to switch over to this framework about ~20 years ago.

What I was always a little bit confused about was the weird system of computing preferences with percentages of CPU (cores), different sets for home, work, school or the enforced switching between tasks and so on.

Wouldn't it be good to fully overhaul the preferences system to fit to modern computers?
- Single core CPUs turned into multi core CPU,
- RAM sizes increased,
- disks are measured in TB instead of GB and
- dial-ups are history, network speed is no longer measured in KB/s.

Additionally, nowadays we (may) have dynamic electricity prices depending on the availability of wind and solar power in your region. Even further thoughts, why not controlling BOINC with e.g. Home Assistant? If energy prices are low or your private solar roof delivers power -> turn on your CPUs!

What my wishes are for BOINC...
- more simple CPU usage settings (instead of % of CPU and % of CPU time),
- ability to disable 'switch between tasks x minutes',
- more flexible schedules, for example:
-- limit CPU cores by daytime or weekday,
-- limit GPU usage by daytime or weekday,
-- finish currently running task if CPU/GPU usage is changed by schedule,
- implement event log (again) as a tab in BOINC manager,
- project priority instead of ressource share percentage,
- simple API controls.

What are your thoughts or wishes?



Regards,
baracutio

Hello,

Thank you for your feedback.
You might be right, we need to revisit this one day.
However, with the limited resources we have we cannot provide any timelines.

Regardig Home Assistant, it's possible to do it with a 3rd-party addon: https://github.com/hectorespert/boinc-addons

---

BOINC maintainer.
For any insight, check my BOINC Development Blog.

What my wishes are for BOINC...
- ability to disable 'switch between tasks x minutes',

Why?


You suggest that things need to be simplified

What I was always a little bit confused about was the weird system of computing preferences with percentages of CPU (cores), different sets for home, work, school or the enforced switching between tasks and so on.

but then you suggest something that makes it even more complicated than it is now.

- more flexible schedules, for example:
-- limit CPU cores by daytime or weekday,
-- limit GPU usage by daytime or weekday,
-- finish currently running task if CPU/GPU usage is changed by schedule,

- project priority instead of resource share percentage,

There is part of the problem- it is not a resource share percentage, it is a ratio (the % values after the Resource share value let people see what the percentage is that those values give to each project).
Just having 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc to set the priority for projects will give much less control over the sharing of the compute resources between projects- those numbers will somehow have to be converted to the present share values in order for the Manager to schedule work.

And i'm not sure that changing the name from Resource share to Project share would be of much help at this time. Particularly as Resource share is exactly what it is- the share of computing resources available to each of the projects.

Additionally, nowadays we (may) have dynamic electricity prices depending on the availability of wind and solar power in your region. Even further thoughts, why not controlling BOINC with e.g. Home Assistant? If energy prices are low or your private solar roof delivers power -> turn on your CPUs!

That should be quite doable under Computing Preferences, have another option to enable suspend work that can be linked to another programme somehow (or use to the Exclusive Application option- compute/don't compute based on the input from another programme, starts stops a Compute/don't compute programme or similar).

---

Grant
Darwin NT.