The message of the day on the Sun machines here at the University of
Michigan included the following today:
* * * * *
Please do not run the Seti At Home program on the Login Servers. Although
it is for a good cause, the Login Servers do not have any spare CPU cycles
to donate. Running Seti At Home interferes with other users getting their
work done.
* * * * *
This illustrates the importance of getting permission before running
processor-intensive programs on machines that are not entirely your own.
There are only about thirty people logged in on the machine that I'm using
right now, and as usual almost all of them are running Pine; even with
this comparatively light load the slowdown was apparently bad enough to be
a problem. I suspect that people trying to run Seti on these machines at a
peak time of year would create a big performance drag, and force the
administrators to monitor individual users' processor usage more closely
to prevent such abuses. It is easy to forget about such consequences in
the quest for CPU time.
I'd like to think that GIMPS members, on the whole, do not deserve
warnings like the one above. Let's keep it that way.
David A. Miller
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
________________________________________________________________
Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm
