Oh well, most Flash stuff already runs my CPU to 100% even when it's clear it shouldn't. (100% CPU to display a static "Game Paused" screen? Give me a break!).
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"After receiving the WU, the user's computer will perform the computation. The game developer can control how much of the user's CPU is devoted to computation by setting the % usage (either statically or dynamically)."
How do you accurately control the amount of CPU a program takes in user-space? Can you really have a process that will restrict itself to using no more than 25% CPU? (Also, 25% of a fast CPU is more than 25% of a slow one)
The apps that we're running right now control it pretty well using a sneaky trick. We can't get much computer information from java in an unsigned app, so we measure how long each sub-part of a work unit has taken and sleep an appropriate amount of time. For example, if we are trying to use 25% and a sub-work takes 100ms, we sleep for 300ms. This effectively gives us 25% usage of the available CPU. It will be no higher than that anyway - it might be lower if something else is using substantial CPU time.
As far as the fast versus slow nodes, we normalize everything based on the average computer that completes work each day. So a fast computer may earn 2X or more what a slow computer earns.
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"After receiving the WU, the user's computer will perform the computation. The game developer can control how much of the user's CPU is devoted to computation by setting the % usage (either statically or dynamically)."
How do you accurately control the amount of CPU a program takes in user-space? Can you really have a process that will restrict itself to using no more than 25% CPU? (Also, 25% of a fast CPU is more than 25% of a slow one)