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Memory requirements for DC

M

Mudbone

Member
I am in the process of putting together a fast gaming rig. (AMD FX-55) I have never done any DC before but I figure that it would be a shame to let all this processing power just sit there when I am not gaming. As far as memory requirements are concerned, can a DC machine make use of more than 1G of memory. It seems that most gamers are sticking to 1Gb in two 512 sticks these days. Most games can't really utilize more. I wasn't sure about DCing. It wouldn't be that much more to go ahead and bump it up to 2Gb if it will get used. Also, is it possible to run multiple operations at the same time and will this affect memory usage? Finally with the release of Win Xp 64 change or improve anything as far as DC is concerned?
 
Well it seems those of us with hyperthreaded P4's can run two DC clients at once without worrying too much. With F@H, the only need for at least 512mb RAM is if you choose to do bigger work units, which can be chosen during console setup. With a gig of RAM I will be running 2 clients doing big work units 🙂
 
2 GB would really be a waste if the only reason for chosing it was DCing. As malak said, F@H can be RAM hungry as well as the ClimatePredition Classic client. I'm not sure about BOINC, but I really think that 1 GB is perfect for whatever DC you do, especially as the AMD is a single threaded CPU anyway.
 
Under BOINC, different projects have different memory & disk-requirements, every wu is marked with these requirements.

For seti-wu, this is 64 MB memory & 0.5MB disk, due to a little bit is used by BIOS and such a computer must have more than 64 MB to get any work. The actual memory-usage is more or less the same as "classic", below 20 MB... maybe a little more if showing the screensaver-graphics...
CPDN is marked as 60 MB memory & 600 MB disk, and uses around 50 MB.
LHC is marked as 100 MB memory & 30 MB disk, not sure on the exact memory-usage but if remembers correctly less than CPDN.

Predictor@home & Einstein@home, not sure at this time, but AFAIK less than 100 MB actual memory-usage.

The BOINC core-client is normally using less than 5 MB, so for the moment all projects runs on a single-cpu-computer with 128 MB memory, so 1 GB should be enough. 😎

Of course, later projects can have higher requirements, but not sure on these at this time. An example is next step of CPDN would probably have higher requirements, and use 4x longer crunch-time or something... There's also been some mentioning of releasing a "high-quality" CPDN-model, using 800 MB memory...
 
I ran two instances of Folding@Home on a HT P4 with 1GB RAM and it was fine for normal use.
 
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