I am running two old notebooks in my laboratory for several server purposes. Last year, I started to support the World Community Grid project with the idle times on these laptops. Nothing interesting so far. However, it is interesting to track the load of the CPUs since they vary on both laptops due to the projects that require different CPU types.
On both notebooks, a Ubuntu server is running. The World Community Grid is attached via the BOINC client. In the web portal, I checked the “Participate in All Projects” option. The system requirements show an overview of the minimum requirements to join the projects.
Here are two graphs of my notebooks, both in the yearly view. It is obvious that the first one runs constantly on about 60 % while the second one flaps monthly between 60 % and 5 % (idle):
The following configurations are available on my laptops:
| PC 1 | PC 2 | |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T5750 @ 2.00GHz | Mobile AMD Sempron(tm) Processor 3600+ |
| Architecture | x86_64 64-bit | i686 32-bit |
| RAM | 2 GB | 2 GB |
The main difference is the 32- vs. 64-bit architecture. That’s it.