ATLAS@Home: ATLAS@home releases a beta application for the multi core jobs

We have released a beta application named "ATLAS_MCORE" for the ATLAS multi-core jobs.

If you are interested in testing it on your machine, you need to allow test task in your project preference to receive jobs from this new application.

This can be enabled by login to your account on the atlasathome webpage, then click on "Your account", then click on "ATLAS@Home preferences", then check the box next to "Run test applications".

The multi-core version will check the BOINC client for both the available CPU cores(the number of CPU cores the client is configured to give to BOINC to use) and available memory size(the number of memory size the client is configured to give to BOINC to use) to decide how many cores will be allocated to one virtual machine which runs the ATLAS job.

For the ATLAS multi-core job, the relation between memory size and number of CPU cores is defined in this formula:

Total_Memory=1300MB+1000MB*Number_of_CPU_Cores

For example, a 1 core job requires 2300 MB memory, and a 2 core job requires 3300 MB memory.

The number of CPU cores which will be allocated to the virtual machine is also calculated according to this formula.
Number_of_CPU_cores=(Total_Memory-1300MB)/1000MB
The minimum number between Number_of_CPU_cores and the available CPU cores from the client is used to allocate to the virtual machine.

Currently, this test app can utilize from 2 to 8 cores of the client depending on the available CPU cores and memory size from the client.

By using multi-core jobs, we expect the runtime of jobs is close to runtime_of_single_core_job/number_of_cores, and it can significantly saves the usage of memory for clients which offers multi-cores to BOINC.
____________

More...