[ltp] Running SETI@Home (or loading your processor)

[Christopher Sawtell]

--Boundary-00=_7d5pD5Mviz+YVfw
Content-Type: text/plain;
  charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline

On Tue, 20 Dec 2005 10:11, Bernhard Sputh wrote:
> Hi Bill,
>
> On Monday 19 December 2005 20:52, Bill Wohler wrote:
> > Would you not run CPU-intensive programs on your ThinkPad at all? Does
> > running such programs limit the lifespan of a computer?
>
> A computational extensive program should not affect the hardware at all,
> except maybe in mechanical computers. I had seti@home running 24*7
> without any side effects, the machines I used are still up and running
> :)
>
> > Would you run them part-time to give the board a chance to cool off
> > occasionally?
> >
> > Or are the thermal changes worse, are the units designed to tolerate
> > such heat, and would you just let them run all the time?
>
> Nope, thermal stress is much worse than running things constantly.
>
>
> My guess for Your defect is an initial problem of the GPU or graphics
> memory.
I make sure of 3 things before running a compute intensive program.

1: I  prop up the lappie so that the air intake is completely 
unobstructed. I pop a book, cd case or some such under the back side to 
lift it so as to leave and air gap of about 5mm.

2: Make sure the DynamicClocks option is true. grep -i /etc/X11/xorg.conf 
should give you this:
          Option      "DynamicClocks"     "True"  # [<bool>

For me, this made an enormous difference to the temperature of my ThinkPad.

3: I'd run the seti@home process at a niceness of 19.

I wrote a tiny little one line cpu temperature monitoring script. It tells 
me that while the T/P is busy up grading Gentoo, the temperature is about 
65 degrees C. It's attached.


-- 
CS

--Boundary-00=_7d5pD5Mviz+YVfw
Content-Type: application/x-shellscript;
  name="watchtemp.sh"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: attachment;
	filename="watchtemp.sh"

tput clear;
while true;
  do
    cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM0/temperature; tput home; sleep 10;
  done;

--Boundary-00=_7d5pD5Mviz+YVfw--