Power Management

Many people and companies want finer gain controls put into BOINC for better power management. We need to identify the various scenarios people and companies want to support before we can put together a plan to address them.

Power Policies

• BOINC should never change an operating system setting.

Usage Scenarios

Below is a list of scenarios we need to support:

• Company X wants to impose a company mandate that machines should go to sleep 30 minutes after the user goes inactive.

TODO: BOINC already has the 'Suspend work if no mouse/keyboard activity in last X Minutes' preference, how does this differ?

Isn't it "allow work if no mouse/keyboard activity in lat X minutes?"

• Local power company declares energy alert for a hot afternoon. User wishes to snooze BOINC until 8PM, the general time that power demand subsides.

User really should shut the machines down in that case. But being able to snooze BOINC until 5:30PM when everybody has gone home is another common usage scenario

• On our project, people asks explicitly for some temperature control, in order to avoid the fan to start speeding in the midnight. (from Alejandro Rivero)

• A simpler approach to preventing overheating would be to limit BOINC*and* all other processes to a maximum CPU percentage. So, with a limit of 50%, if other programs use 20%, BOINC gets 30%. If other programs use 70%, BOINC gets nothing. (Credit to WCG for this idea, posted by David Barnard)

Platform Implementation Notes

Windows

On Mon, 4 Aug 2008 19:15:56 -0400 mike bader wrote:

The old SETISPY used to use Speedfan to shutdown SETI.
Isn't that source code now available?

> Nicolas Alvarez replied:
>
> SpeedFan isn't open source.
>
> However, it can be configured to save a log of temperatures 
> into a plain old text file. Then any other program can access it.

On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 4:35 PM, Rom Walton  wrote:
I believe most CPU throttling programs on Windows use the Job Object
mechanism:
 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms684161(VS.85).aspx

Now that we can treat both the worker processes and graphic processes as
separate entities, we could use this functionality in Windows.

Mac OS X

On Tue, 5 Aug 2008 at 09:51:49 +01000 James Wanless wrote:

On mac, I found this script:
 http://www.macosxhints.com/dlfiles/tp_bash.txt
(which works quite nicely on my PPC iMac, but only gives very limited  
info on Intel)

Linux

On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 15:58 +0200,  Jorden van der Elst wrote:  
>On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 10:51 AM, James Wanless <james@grok.ltd.uk> wrote:
>
> On linux it seems the best bet is lm_sensors (as Eric Korpela has
> already mentioned), though I don't think even this may be quite
> 'ready' yet.

According to
http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/lm_sensors-guide-or-how-to-monitor-cpu-temperature-in-linux-fedora-core-6-26-kernel/

>"To monitor CPU temperature in Linux you will need to install lm_sensors
>package and then install gnome-applet-sensors (assuming you are using gnome)
>to get a nice graphical display. The devil is in the details. The shipped
>lm_sensors doesn't work on Fedora Core 6 with 2.6 kernels. It also doesn't
>support core 2 duo."