4 ms·

I went to this university and took several of Professor Cooper's classes. He was a great guy and he seemed really passionate about his Mersenne project. One t

• easytiger 14y ago
  why on earth would they run it as you user?
  • Simucal 14y ago
    Several of us had root access to the few Linux boxes in the CS computer lab.
• yock 14y ago
  What OS was this? Processes like these (Folding, Seti, etc) should be "niced" on *nix-like OSes to have the lowest possible priority. Not sure what this looks like on Windows, but I imagine it's possible.
  • sp332 14y ago
    In windows, each process has one of 6 priority levels, and each thread has one of 7 priority levels. The combination is looked up in a table and yields one of 22 values between 1 and 31. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms685100%28v=vs.85%29.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms68... You can manually change priority levels by right-clicking a process in the Task Manager. Not sure how to do it automatically or on a command line. Edit: note the OS will "boost" priorities on certain processes or threads sometimes. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms684828%28v=vs.85%29.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms68...
  • acdha 14y ago
    nice doesn't help with I/O pressure or memory contention, particularly if it used enough memory to contribute to swap activity. Even something like pressure on the system L2/L3 caches can be a big deal, particularly on older systems where those were less generous.
    • eeperson 14y ago
      Thats where ionice or, even better, cgroups[1] come in :) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cgroup http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cgroup
      • acdha 14y ago
        Agreed, although I would note that at least on Linux and FreeBSD those haven't been a realistic option for a terribly long period of time – if the user didn't go to school recently, it's likely that they weren't an option. (also, not sure about cgroups but ionice did absolutely nothing useful with swap churn when I tested it awhile back)
• X-Istence 14y ago
  That's sounds familiar. I went to a university where the one professor that was using Linux (and his knowledge was very little) was constantly tying up the Linux machines in our labs to run his prime number generation tool. His research was into finding a faster/easier way to do prime number factorization in an attempt to speed up cryptography of any kind that uses it. Part of that was finding an easier/faster way to compute prime numbers in the first place. It was fascinating stuff ... but those machines were useless for anything but doing those calculations since it was using up all cores/HT's.
• duck 14y ago
  After reporting the problem several times I simply added a line in my bash file to kill it when I logged on. It would have been discovered sooner if you hadn't done that. :)
  • pcopley 14y ago
    Would have.
  • deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
• DanBC 14y ago
  David McOwen was a tech who installed distributed computing clients on the machines in his lab. (http://www.securityfocus.com/news/300 http://www.securityfocus.com/news/300) > A computer network administrator faces multiple felony charges and years in a Georgia prison for allegedly installing Distributed.net clients without permission. Prosecutors say its justice, others aren't so sure > A college computer technician who offered his school's unused computer processing power for an encryption research project will be tried next month in Georgia for computer theft and trespassing charges that carry a potential total of 120 years in jail. > The closely-watched case if one of the first in which state prosecutors have lodged felony charges for allegedly downloading third-party software without permission. What a lot of people missed was the significantly raised electricity bills from having 500 PCs running this software all day. And a gorgeously authentic 2001 page (http://freemcowen.com/ http://freemcowen.com/)
  • EvanAnderson 14y ago
    He ended up getting a year of probation (http://www.freemcowen.com/thelatest.htm http://www.freemcowen.com/thelatest.htm). Facing a huge prison sentence for "hacking"... sounds eerily familiar. >sigh<
    • deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
      • DanBC 14y ago
        Yes. He faced a theoretical 120 years in jail. Even though that was unlikely he settled because, from the EFF statement: > "David never should have been prosecuted in the first place, but we're glad that the state decided to stop," said Senior Staff Attorney Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). "This is a very good result for David. He very likely could have won if the case had gone to trial, but trials cost money and you never know what will happen." And this is what he got for settling: > Under the terms of the deal, announced today, McOwen will receive one year of probation for each criminal count, to run concurrently, make restitution of $2100, and perform 80 hours of community service unrelated to computers or technology. McOwen will have no felony or misdemeanor record under Georgia's First Offender Act.
• ArbitraryLimits 14y ago
  My university's physics department did the same thing with SETI@home. The SETI@home guys were smart enough to make their program run as a screen-saver that displayed Fourier Transforms so people thought it made the lab look more sciency and left it on.
  • stephengillie 14y ago
    Another important note is that SETI@home actually did stop running when you were using the PC. If you left Task Manager up, you could see the difference on the CPU usage graph.
    • danieldrehmer 14y ago
      and that's why they didn't find any alien intelligence yet